The Faith of a Liberal

Abstract

In our time, Professor Cohen is one of the few great voices of what used to be known as Enlightenment—a view of life compounded of Rationalism and Humanism, of faith in reason and faith in man. He has labored with passionate enthusiasm to remind us to think, and to trust only the conclusions which we could parse. He has preached the necessity for analyzing even the most "plausible and self-evident propositions," much to the irritation of the religious-minded of all sects, and he has himself given classic examples of how such analysis should be accomplished. But Professor Cohen is a moralist, too. He is not interested in logic as a thinking machine, and he has none of the naive and cocksure optimism of science in the generation of Bazarov. Always conscious of the dependence of thought upon ignorance, prejudice and values, he is in no sense ashamed of believing in the Rights of Man, and in his Duties, too.