“WE have the paradox that at the beginning of the Renaissance, when the conquest of nature and the creation of modern science were still unrealized, man appears in godlike freedom with a sense of unbounded power and greatness; while at the end of the nineteenth century, when nature has been conquered and there seem no limits to the powers of science, man is once more conscious of his misery and weakness as the slave of material circumstance and physical appetite and death. Instead of the heroic exaltation of humanity which was characteristic of the naturalism of the Renaissance, we see the humiliation of humanity…. Man is stripped of his glory and freedom and left as a naked human animal shivering in an inhuman universe.”
~Christopher Dawson: Christianity and the New Age.
