Week Eight of the 2013 Book Challenge Revisited

I finished The Magician's Twin this afternoon and completed two books from the Sherlock Holmes collection earlier in the week.  The final essay by Michael Matheson Miller outlines strategies for reclaiming a classical understanding of education. 

Among other things, this essay helped me better understand why I am so drawn to Charlotte Mason's ideas on education. If I were mentoring another high school student the entire collection of essays would be on our reading list along with The Discarded Image, That Hideous Strength, The Abolition of Man, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 

Selections from the ninety-three notes I made in The Magician's Twin:

"Plato said that the beginning of philosophy is wonder.  St. Tomas Aquinas said that the poet and the philosopher are akin because they both deal with wonder. Lewis argued that modern education often did the very opposite of what it was supposed to--it destroyed wonder." ~~p. 320 C.S. Lewis, Scientism, and the Moral Imagination.  Michael Matheson Miller

"Lewis took pains to emphasize that he was not "anti-science."  But he unequivocally opposed scientism, the wrong-headed belief that modern science supplies the only reliable method of knowledge about the world...." ~~p. 12 The Magician's Twin. John G. West

"For Lewis, the problem with this 'Myth' is not that it does not appeal to the imagination, but that it is all imagination and no logic.  In fact, it contradicts the very foundation of the scientific worldview it claims to espouse.  ~~p. 136 Darwin in the Dock. John G. West

"That is how tyrannies come in.  In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render the most potent.  It has been magic, it has been Christianity.  Now it will certainly be science." ~~p. 57 C.S. Lewis on Science as a Threat to Freedom.  Edward S. Larson quotes C.S. Lewis in God in the Dock, 314.  

From The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; with an Introduction by Robert Ryan.

"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes.  "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.  ~~The Sign of the Four. Holmes to Watson as they wait for the signal that the Aurora has been seen. 

"The devils' agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?" ~~The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Sherlock Holmes as he and Watson discuss Dr. Mortimer's account of the scene of the crime.