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. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... THE BASIS OF FAITH AT last we may at least approach the real question before us: Is what the poet, the seer, the prophet see there? And on the very threshold we are met with a flat denial of the possibility in man of spiritual insight, or of any knowledge of reality at all. Such a denial, of course, is not new, and it is less radical and thoroughgoing in our day than it was in earlier times when men dared to go to the length of their logic. Nor is it altogether an evil, but may conceivably be needful as a prod to the advance of thought and the broadening of faith, as the criticism of the sophists opened the door to Socrates, as a barren deism prepared the way for Methodism, which " fell on the dry heart like rain." Had it not been for the negation of Hume, there would have been no opportunity for the fruitful philosophic recovery which we owe to Germany. Never, it would seem, does the new and deeper emotion shed its fertilizing waters to any renewing purpose until the east wind of doubt has swept over the soul. Hence the recurrent world-phenomenon of doubt in our day, when, as Clough said, " it seems His newer will we should not think of Him at all," unless we can arrive at some profounder insight. The older thought which it questions and criticizes may seem to go down utterly, but it "Decomposes but to recompose, Becomes my universe that thinks and knows." How confidently the old denial is now put forth, with what irony and disdain, may be heard on all sides, though it has lost much of its former audacity. After this fashion it tosses the spiritual world aside as not only unknowable, but indeed quite useless: "The universe upon this view (whether it understands itself or not) falls apart into two regions; we may call them two...
