The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel

Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for:

Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so.

The Glass Bead Game contributed largely to the complete defeat of feuilletonism and to that newly awakened delight in strict mental exercises to which we owe the origin of a new, monastically austere intellectual discipline.

philology

it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

This mathematical and astronomical game of formulas required great attentiveness, keenness, and concentration.

This process paralleled the general evolution of cultural consciousness,

by whatever branch of learning happened to be experiencing a period of high development or a renaissance.

was taken over by mathematicians.