What makes 'The Marriage of Souls' such a wonderful book is Collins's intricate reconstruction of the late eighteenth-century world. Simplicity and philosophy are the hallmarks of eighteenth-century art and architecture. The classically pure lines look deceptively simple and unburdened by heavy symbolism or imagery.
The most enjoyable things are the old eighteenth-century terraces that are still standing, that domestic architecture.
You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.
What Marie Antoinette was to eighteenth-century France, Mary Pickford is to twentieth-century America.
'The Marriage of Souls', like 'The Rationalist', is an exploration of humanist philosophy wrapped between the delicate leaves of an eighteenth-century tale. The story of the two novels - and they should be read as a two-volume work - centres around the old war-horse of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl. But what a boy and what a girl.
Pure phenomenology claims to be the science of pure phenomena. This concept of the phenomenon, which was developed under various names as early as the eighteenth century without being clarified, is what we shall have to deal with first of all.
Our political organization, based as it is on an eighteenth-century separation of powers and on a nineteenth-century nationalist state, is generally recognized to be semiobselete.
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.
Next to the word 'Nature,' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth.
The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist.
I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.
But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.
I think I was born with a sense of instantaneous connection between the things I perceived in the world and my feelings about those things my character has served me well it has made me. well, an eighteenth -century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in twentieth-century Berkeley.
People are now layering all kinds of different things together. Eighteenth century, 19th century, rustic, modern. Three dimensional printed pieces, very high end technological pieces, but mixed with local artisan stuff.
Liberty had many friends in the eighteenth century.
The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God?