In The Shaping of Modern Thought noted historian Crane Brinton shows how the answers given to these questions, from the Renaissance to the present, have molded the intellectual and social atmosphere of the modern world. With sanity, balance, and penetration, Dr. Brinton relates scientific rationalism and twentieth century anti-intellectualism both products of an age-old tension between the real and the ideal, the practical and the desirable to the mainstream of Western intellectual history.