On Refusing Grace and Giving up Intelligence

"Schemes that once flourished lose their efficacy and cease to function; in an ever more rapid succession, as crises multiply and remedies have less effect, new schemes are introduced; feverish effort is followed by listlessness; the situation becomes regarded as hopeless; in a twilight of straitened but gracious living men await the catalytic trifle that will reveal to a surprised world the end of a once brilliant day."

-Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding 210 (1978).

HT: Patrick Brennan