Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944

In the present crisis of our civilization we have risen to vertiginous heights in the mechanical and chemical sciences, pure and applied (…) But we have neither faith in, nor respect for, the conclusions of humanistic arguments, nor yet in the validity of social theories. Today we very much need to establish the balance between the hypertrophied influence of natural science and its applications on the one hand, and the backwardness of social science, with the constant impotence of social engineering, on the other. (13)

Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, 1950

As the west faces its recent dilemma of the abdication of practical foresight in face of crucial perils, while at the same time science becomes able to exercise its own forms of prediction with ever-increasing power and dangerous effect, it is profitable to recapture the original Greek view which unified the theoretical and the practical intelligence. It is premature to tax Greek thinkers with naiveté because they assumed that there are skills available to man to control and improve and civilize his life and action, and that these have to be trained and cultivated by the same logic that governs the physical sciences. The Greeks in fact invented political and social science and when they said “science”, they meant it. It was the techne, that procedure for which Plato sought an “epistemology” (episteme). Though his philosophy always concentrated on the abstract levels of the intellect, he never forgot the technical procedures which had given it birth. The moral effect of this unification was striking. (84)

McLuhan, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.