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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
COMPARED WITH THE 19TH CENTURY, OURS IS AN AGE OF intellectual dishonesty. The 19th century did not invent the modern vision of the world, nor did it work out its implications. All that was already done in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it was in the 19th century that the awareness of these implications became widespread, partly through the sheer lapse of time, and more significantly, through the emergence of a large literate middle class which possessed the means, in various senses, for contemplating the new vision. The consequences of this are well known. The 19th century satisfied the demand and produced the secular prophets who wrestled, heroically, with the problem of finding a new meaning for life, honestly acceptable in the light of new critical standards and of the new knowledge.