“ science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy. ”
Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). copy citation
| Author | Henry Adams |
|---|---|
| Source | Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres |
| Topic | science truth |
| Date | 1904 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4584/pg4584-images.html |
Context
“The passage between the two epochs is as beautiful as the Slave of Michael Angelo; but, to feel its beauty, you should see it from above, as it came from its radiant source. Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy. The architects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took the Church and the universe for truths, and tried to express them in a structure which should be final. Knowing by an enormous experience precisely where the strains were to come, they enlarged their scale to the utmost point of material endurance, lightening the load and distributing the burden until the gutters and gargoyles that seem mere ornament, and the grotesques that seem rude absurdities, all do work either for the arch or for the eye;”
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