harply contrasted as before. The author of
this book desires, in the first place, to be of service to such readers as
feel the need of setting themselves right upon these questions, which touch
the highest interests of mankind, but who lack time and opportunity to
investigate independently a realm in which so many and so heterogeneous
sciences come into mutual contact. The illogical and confused manner in
which some noisy leaders confound these sciences and their problems and
consequences, renders it still more difficult to arrive at a satisfactory
result; and thus perhaps many readers will look with interest upon an
investigation designed to simplify the different problems and the different
attempts at their solution, and to treat them not only in their relations
to each other, but also separately. But with this primary object, the
author combines another: to render a service to some among the many who
perceive the harmony between their scientific conviction and their
religious need threatened or shaken by the results of science, and who are
unwilling to lose this harmony, or, having lost it, desire to regain it.
Those voices are indeed becoming louder, and more generally and willingly
heard, which proclaim an irreconcilability between faith and {2} knowledge,
between the religious and the scientific views of the world; which declare
that peace between the two can only be had at the price either of
permitting the religious impulses of the heart to be stifled in favor of
science, of satisfying the religious need of the mind with a nourishment
which in the light of science proves to be an illusion, or, as sceptics in
theory and eclectics in practice, of renouncing with resignation a logical
connection and foundation to their former view of the world. The most
striking proof of the extent to which these voices are heard, is the fact
that it has been possible for a one-sided pessimism to become the
fashionable system of philosophy in a Christian nation. The most effective
means for opposing such discordant voices, and for making amends for the
disagreements which they have occasioned, undoubtedly consists in the
actual proof of the contrary of their theories, in the clear presentation
of a standpoint from which not only the most unrestricted freedom of
investigation and the most unreserved acknowledgment of its results shall
be in perfect harmony with the undiminished care of our entire religious
possession, but in which this