“LIFE IS bound to prove a disappointing adventure for those who, through a weak yielding to their emotional and imaginative impressions, tend to substitute feeling for thought. Such persons develop minds that are but a passive reflection of phenomena.They are unable to transform a fact into an idea. They have no power to synthesize their experience into a judgment. They see only what meets the eye. Their determinations are but an automatic response to external stimuli. Their views are mere emotional reactions to outward circumstances. They are at the mercy of every fashion. Their impressions are without analysis and their reflections without comparison. Their observations are a query and their wisdom a platitude. Their sayings are an echo, and their lives a quotation. Recent times have been prolific in the growth of this type of human being. Their mentality is that which, in the jargon of the day, is described as bourgeois. It is marked by a smug self-satisfaction and is very resistant to spiritual impressions. The deep things of existence always elude this bourgeois mind. Such a mind merely touches but the fringe of reality. It is shallow, without individuality, lacking in noble ideals and unspiritual. The bourgeois type drifts through life without discovering itself or its God or even the world in which it passes its days. The rapid increase of men of this kind has made of the world a spiritual desert. “With desolation is all the land made desolate, because there is no one that considereth in the heart.” (Jer. xii. 11)

— Fr. Edward Leen, Why the Cross? (Sheed and Ward, 1938), pp. 213-14

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