Excerpt from The American Historical School
The sagest philosophers, under all religious dispensations, have thought the temporal condition and prospects of man a subject, in dignity, importance and obscurity, inferior only to the greater question of his eternal destiny. Indeed, man's mortal life is perhaps the darker theme; for most wise men, in every age, have held that some ray of Divine illumination has illustrated that more momentous problem, in itself too hard for human solution, while the often-disputed topic of the constant and indefinite earthly progress of our race is elucidated by no revelation, and the hopes and fears of terrestrial man must be determined by the lights which nature has furnished him. Although it should seem that every self-conscious being, possessed of memory and the powers of volition, reflection and comparison, ought to be able to solve, unaided, all questions connected with his own moral or intellectual position and progress; yet, in this enigmatical world of ours, man is not left to puzzle out, by his inward light alone, the riddle of his own existence. To the revelations of consciousness, the experience of states of moral and intellectual being, the science of necessary truths, he may add the knowledge acquired through the powers of sensuous observation, the laws of the physical universe, the rules of practical wisdom, which the discipline of thousands of years has accumulated.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The American Historical School (Classic Reprint) (George P. Marsh)