Category: “Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man”

Mind (1961), LXX (277): 99-106.

Educated far beyond their capacity for analytical thought

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. [105]

Taking great pains to deceive oneself

Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. [99]