Time & Perspective Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

Cohen is skewering the way the humanities keep a kind of intellectual afterlife on permanent retainer. The joke lands because it’s half compliment, half indictment: literature and philosophy have the peculiar power to make dead thinkers feel urgently present, to the point that they become “idols” again - not just referenced, but venerated. A “sober scientist” would find this unsettling because science is built to kill its idols. It honors predecessors, yes, but it does so by trying to supersede them; the canon is a ladder you’re supposed to climb and then discard.

The key word is “resurrected.” Cohen isn’t describing careful historical study; he’s describing revivalism. Philosophical systems and literary movements return like fashions, often driven by charisma, crisis, or cultural boredom with the present. An ancient metaphysician becomes a ready-made authority figure when modern life feels incoherent; a Victorian moralist gets dusted off when society wants permission to be judgmental again. In that sense, “past idols” aren’t just thinkers - they’re usable myths.

Cohen’s subtext is a warning about disciplinary incentives. In literature and philosophy, brilliance can be treated as immunity from refutation. The past becomes a boutique of prestige goods: cite the right name, inherit some of its aura. His wry appeal to the “sober scientist” is strategic, too: it borrows science’s ethos of falsifiability to embarrass humanistic nostalgia, without denying the humanities’ real talent - making old minds speak in new emergencies.