November 29, 2005
-
“The Chinese… speak of a great thing (the
greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all
predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is
Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe
goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and
tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man
should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression,
conforming all activities to that great exemplar.”– C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man
“In his preface to That Hideous Strength, Lewis says the novel has a serious point that he has tried to make in this little book, The Abolition of Man. The novel is a work of fantasy or science fiction, while Abolition
is a short philosophical work about moral education, but as we shall
see the two go together; we will understand either book better by
having read and thought about the other.”– Dale Nelson, Notes on The Abolition of Man
“In Epiphany Term, 1942, C.S. Lewis delivered the Riddell
Memorial Lectures… in….
the University of Durham…. He
delivered three lectures
entitled ‘Men without Chests,’ ‘The Way,’ and ‘The
Abolition of Man.’ In them he set out to attack and
confute what he saw as the errors of his age. He started by
quoting some fashionable lunacy from an educationalists’
textbook, from which he developed a general attack on moral
subjectivism. In his second lecture he argued against
various contemporary isms, which purported to replace
traditional objective morality. His final lecture, ‘The
Abolition of Man,’ which also provided the title of the
book published the following year, was a sustained attack on
hard-line scientific anti-humanism.The intervening fifty years have largely vindicated Lewis.”
– J. R. Lucas, The Restoration of Man
