Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09101_Field_TCGG T866.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 929b | 16 lines

postures of the collective consciousness, as Mallarmé
proclaimed. Yet these modes of collective or tribal
consciousness proliferating in the telegraphic (simultaneous)
press, remain uncongenial and opaque to the bookmen locked
in “single vision and Newton’s sleep.”

     The principal ideas of the eighteenth century were so
crude as to seem risible to the wits of the time. The great chain
of Being was in its way as comical as the chains which
Rousseau proclaimed in his Social Contract . Equally inadequate
as an idea of order was the merely visual notion of goodness as
a plenum: “The best of all possible worlds” was merely a
quantitative idea of a bag crammed to the utmost with
goodies—an idea which lurked still in the nursery world of R. L.
Stevenson. (“The world is so full of a number of things.”) But in
J. S. Mill’s Liberty  the quantitative idea of truth as an ideal