"Systems always breed more systems; when new liberating movements arose in England and on the continent during the 17th and 18th centuries, they took the familiar European form of anti-systems. Thus, 'the Enlightenment,' which claimed to free men from superstition and from the dogma of old authority and petrified thought, itself acquired much of the rigidity and authoritarianism of what it set out to combat. The European Enlightenment was in fact little more than the confinement of the mind in a prison of 17th- and 18th-century design. The new 'rationalism'--which Europeans boasted was their new freedom--was the old human dogmatic servitude."
--Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, 1958