The rewards of larger families, domestic crafts, volunteer work, artistic pursuits and vigilance toward the elderly will be rediscovered. Instead of being openly disparaged by our opinion-shaping institutions, these will be embraced and publicly celebrated.

It soon became clear to them that the vast majority of what is written on the web goes unread and even that which is read, is quickly forgotten.

In the days before the telephone, the phrase “I will call on you” was commonly used to mean that someone will visit you, or speak to you. The phrase has since largely fallen into disuse, with the word “call” being much more commonly associated with the telephone than speaking to someone in person. The term “will call”, however, has stuck, and means that the customer “will call on” the company to pick up the tickets or merchandise, as opposed to having the items delivered to them

Gumshoe:

On a bus with a large watermelon on my lap and two spoons in my pocket. going to the quad to devour it with a beautiful girl on a warm summer night

Me:

Well played, mon frere…

I hope you have a knife.

Gumshoe:

I don’t, god help me

I think that, more than any other single consideration, is what occasioned the modern (post-medieval) repudiation of Aristotelian-Thomism.  Grant the principles that Aristotle saw in nature -  especially the most basic, like actuality and potency – and one must logically and rationally conclude that there is a God. (Aquinas’s natural theology is essentially an exposition on what the god known to reason must be like. It is neither revelation nor mysticism, but a clear, succinct, and eminently reasonable treatise.)  Not only must there be a god, but also there must be absolute truth, right and wrong, good and bad action…all the things which our culture tries so hard to do away with.

Indeed, Aristotelianism has been trashed, but in name only and superficially. Modern quantum mechanics is understood in Aristotelian ideas couched in other terms. The flaws in Newtonian physics could have been (and were) exposed by concepts that ultimately derived from Aristotle’s Physics. Even the great non-teleology of Darwinian evolution is steeped in teleology, but by another name.

But why deny the obvious? Why deny that there are final causes when there manifestly are? Why routinely and automatically deride one of the greatest minds? Why would certain enlightenment philosophers try to prove the same things as Aristotle and Aquinas but reject their principles, the principles which really lead to the desired conclusions? It doesn’t make any sense when one regards only the intellectual.

But when you consider where these principles lead morally, then it makes sense.