ABSTRACT
Maine de Biran wrote that To do philosophy is to reflect, to use one’s reason, in everything and everywhere, in whatever position one may be, amid madness as amid wisdom, in the hurly-burly of the world, as in the solitude and silence of a private room. Eliot, in his 1962 work, quotes the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education, a Mr. Hardman, who, speaking on January 12, 1946, observes that the age of industrialism and democracy brought the great cultural traditions of Europe to an end. Hardman continues, In the contemporary world, in which the majority were half-educated and many not even a quarter educated, and in which large fortunes and enormous power could be obtained by exploiting ignorance and appetite, there was a vast cultural breakdown which stretched from America to Europe and from Europe to the East.
