Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature by William James. This book would never have been written had I not been honored with an appointment as Gifford Lecturer on Natural Religion at the University of Edinburgh. In casting about me for subjects of the two courses of ten lectures each for which I […]

Acknowledgment and thanks for permission to use the following selections are herewith tendered to Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Boston, for “Looking Backward,” by Edward Bellamy; to Ginn & Company, Boston, for the International School of Peace, for “The Future of War,” by Jean Bloch; and to Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, for “Progress and […]

Apocrypha is a Greek word, signifying “secret” or “hidden,” but in the sixteenth century it came to be applied to a list of books contained in the Septuagint, or Greek translation of the Old Testament, but not in the Palestinian, or Hebrew Canon. Hence, by theological or bibliographic purists, these books were not regarded as […]

Physica, Physics by Aristotle 384 BC – 322 BC. When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its […]

The same volume I published an essay on Scientific Humanism (a close approximation to P£re Teilhard’s Neo-Humanism) f in which I independently anticipated the tide of Pere Teilhard’s great book by describing humanity as a phenomenon, to be studied and analysed by scientific methods. Soon after the first World War, in Essays of a Biologist, […]

If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that if we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men. […]