In his 1926 book A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann wrote of the "acids of modernity" which eat away not only at belief, but at the disposition to believe. In the years since, there has been a sometimes unconscious, sometimes quite open, concurrence in Lippmann's view, accompanied as often as not by the conclusion that a betting man would put his money on modernity.
Two decades after Lippmann penned his observation about modernity, Evelyn Waugh's protagonist Charles Ryder was reflecting on his long and complicated relationship with the Flyte family and their Catholicism in the book "Brideshead Revisited." At a certain point in the novel, Ryder recalls thinking that he was finished with the Flytes and their religion, and he vowed to live in the world of his five senses. If he could not see, nor taste, nor touch, nor smell, nor hear a thing, he would consider it unreal and unworthy of his attention. His world would henceforth be the world of empiricism. Ryder concludes this recollection of his past thought with the observation, "I now know that no such world exists."
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