Education Quote by Will Durant

Durant draws a clean line between the age of accumulation and the harder art of judgment. Coming from a historian who spent his life compressing civilizations into readable lessons, the quip isn’t an anti-science sneer so much as a warning about modern confidence: we keep mistaking better instruments for better ends. Science, in his framing, is spectacular at answering "how" and increasingly loud about acting like it can answer "should". Philosophy is the older, slower technology for that second question - the discipline that forces you to name your values before you optimize them.

The subtext is a critique of the 20th century’s favorite self-image: rational, progressive, empirically grounded. Durant lived through an era that proved knowledge can scale faster than moral restraint - industrial slaughter, mass propaganda, the atomic bomb. Facts didn’t fail; they simply didn’t veto anything. By pairing "knowledge" with "wisdom", he smuggles in the idea that information without ethical architecture becomes power without accountability. It’s a historian’s take: civilizations don’t collapse because they lack data; they collapse because their priorities rot, their stories stop holding, their elites get cleverer than they get humane.

Rhetorically, the line works because it flatters science while still demoting it. The concession ("Science gives us knowledge") disarms the reader; the pivot ("but only philosophy") tightens the claim into a provocation. "Only" is the pressure point, daring a culture that worships STEM to admit what it can’t quantify: meaning, responsibility, the reasons we bother knowing anything at all.