Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... student to realize that among all peoples who have inherited Christian culture and civilization the choice of ever-increasing multitudes of those whom we may describe as the leaders of thought--and consequently also of the masses influenced by them --is now no longer so much as formerly between Catholicism and some other form of Christianity, but rather between Catholicism and the rejection of supernatural religion altogether. Nowadays the religious question in the main resolves itself into Catholicism versus Unbelief, Agnosticism, Monism, Naturalism. The intellectual difficulties which impede the acceptance of catholic truth by the modern mind are not concerned with individual dogmas; they lie deeper down; they refer to the possibility of Divine Revelation, to the existence of a Supreme Being, to the binding force of morality, to the very capacity of the human mind for attaining to any certain knowledge about the origin, nature, and destiny of man and the universe. These difficulties, arising out of false theories of knowledge, enhance both the interest and the importance of Epistemology for the catholic student. At the same time our investigation, if it is to attain its object, must be wholly impartial and disinterested. A treatise on the Theory of Knowledge cannot possibly be apologetic or polemical in the religious sense. It must be purely philosophical; it must appeal to reason, not to authority; it must be grounded' on universal human experience; it must assume nothing except on grounds of reason; in this sense it must be " presuppositionless ." But only in this sense; for it will bring to light many presuppositions without which no rational investigation and no intelligent thought would be possible. The believer in the Christian...
