Volume 6, Number 3 · March 3, 1966
Progressive Man
By Stephen Toulmin
Science in History
by J.D. Bernal
Hawthorn, 1039 pp., $12.95
Society and Science
edited by Maurice Goldsmith, edited by Alan Mackay
Simon & Schuster, 236 pp., $6.00
The intellectuals of Ireland have done as much as anyone in the last one hundred years to keep the English-speaking world alive and awake. Throughout the whole Northcote-Trevelyan era, when England was siphoning off many of her most fertile and flexible minds into the Higher Civil Service, the Irish were (to put it euphemistically) 'free of administrative cares'—more exactly, they were not their own masters. Instead, they ran rings around their self-appointed rulers. Once the Great Hunger had abated, Irishmen spread into the main body of English and American thought and literature, and took possession. From Shaw and Yeats up to Conor Cruise O'Brien, they have continued ever since to needle their 'betters,' and to mock the transient certainties of Anglo-Saxon ideologues. Exuberant, versatile, inventive, and witty, they have been impossible to ignore. Though brushed aside in England either as licensed jesters or as immoralists—Shaw on the one count, Joyce on the other, Wilde on both—they have always returned to the attack, and by now they form as distinctive a breed as their mid-European counterparts, the Hungarians: a breed which is immediately recognizable wherever it appears.
Review, 3409 words
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