| Summary: | "These current discussions of contemporary themes and thinkers are Essays in Apologetics. Apologetics is the philosophical defense or justification of religion. It aims at vindicating the concrete rationality of the religious side of humanity's life. It attempts a critical refutation of all antagonistic world-views. It meets them in the open, on purely intellectual grounds, as to what is the most rational world-view--one that excludes and invalidates religion, or one that includes and validates it. The volume is a series of studies, rather than a sustained thesis. Yet there runs through them all the contention that nature and man are known truly only when they are viewed as a process of objective mind, realizing itself afresh in and through empirical conditions. Its fundamental object is to maintain the reasonableness of a man of modern culture frankly and earnestly worshiping in some form of "authoritative religion"--In any form, rather than in no form. Hence the persistent polemic against the "mechanical view" of the universe. This merely mechanical interpretation of nature and man and his institutions is a metaphysical perversion of the mechanical theory, properly used in science. It is not science, but the bad metaphysics of some men of science. It is the metaphysics of naturalism and of rigid mechanical determinism, in which there can be no worthy place for the humanities. These essays seek a world-view in which Art and Religion and Philosophy are seen to have valid functions for human weal. The merely scientific man, the man whose world-view is merely that of mechanical science--the undevout astronomer, or geologist, --is mad. Only the devout man is fully sane. The use of the dialectic method will be noted. First statements, though put dogmatically, are not final ones. Criticism follows to show their patent limitations, and thus force them into more concrete forms. The mixture of metaphor with the dialect of philosophy, and the appeal to men's moral and religious needs, as against the regnant naturalism of a metaphysical science, may be faulted. And yet we dare believe that there is a bit of real logic throughout the volume"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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