" Another aspect of that legacy was the buoyant optimism in the schools. All the masters shared the view that man, even in his fallen state, was ‘capable of the fullest intellectual and spiritual enlargement’, that the universe was ordered and therefore accessible to rational inquiry, and that man’s mastery of his environment through his intellect, cumulative knowledge and experience was possible.22 Outside "

― Peter Watson , Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud