Excerpt from The Study of Nature and the Vision of God: With Other Essays in Philosophy

In the endeavour of man to draw near to that ultimate reality with which it is his salvation to make himself at one - the endeavour which is on its practical side religion, on its theoretical side philosophy and theology - there is an elemental distinction between two tendencies or methods. The one, to find God, denies the world. The other retains the world, but when God is found the world becomes new; or rather, in finding God the world also is found, for the knowledge of God is the ultimate truth about the world. To trace these tendencies, in the broad outline of their historical relations of conflict and of combination, was once the hope of the present writer. Such a study, if it could have been undertaken successfully, would have done two things: would have cast light on the forms which in human history the religious endeavour to he at one with God has assumed; and would have marked out for students, in an elementary but yet fundamental way, the ground - currents of the history of philosophy and theology. But it is now almost certain that that plan will never, even in briefest outline, be carried through; and so a number of essays, written at different times and under different circumstances as studies toward it, are published here as separate papers. Each can be read by itself; yet, since there is enough of the original plan in the separate parts to give them a certain unity, it would be better to take them together as forming a single historical discussion. For this reason a short introduction has been prefixed, stating the main point of the discussion and the relation of each of the papers to it.

The essay on Spinoza is the property of Harvard University, and is published here by permission of President Eliot.

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