Climate Of Opinion

Professor Whitehead has recently restored a seventeenth century phrase -- "climate of opinion."  The phrase is much needed.  Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained.

-- Carl Lotus Becker (1873 - 1945), American historian of early American intellectual history and on the Enlightenment, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (1932)