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What I see here is an urge for that very same sense of
order, stability, authority, and control that we have seen
before. It is an urge for a reality or “truth” that is
universal and static. It is an overwhelming and almost
uncontrollable urge for Certainty. And the writing
privileged and prescribed by Current-Traditional Rhetoric,
as Crowley has begun to describe it here, was supposed to
be the means to that end.
But I feel I am moving ahead of myself a little here.
Before I dissect Current-Traditional Rhetoric any further,
I would continue to examine the exact nature of Western
Science that has been looming over these past few pages
because, as I have tried to express, this modern, reasonhearted
Science was a secular resurrection of the
millennia-old Western Religious traditions, of that
tradition of the Christian God and his Word, his son Jesus
Christ, the Logos incarnate, the “supreme” and “absolute”
Reason of Plato and the philosophers of classic rhetoric.
Through this, Certainty had begotten Certainty, but not
simply continued but intensified, thanks in no small part
to the theories of René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton in
the seventeenth century. In France, Descartes worked to
conceive of a system of knowledge founded almost
exclusively upon deductive reasoning, with his famous
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