The intellectual life of modern Europe and its cultural dependencies differs notably from what has gone before. There is all about it an air of matter-of-fact both in its technology and in its science; which culminates in a "mechanistic conception" of all those things with which scientific inquiry is concerned and in the light of which many of the dread realities of the Middle Ages look like superfluous make-believe.

The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1919)