| Summary: | "Between spiritual needs and the results of human science there is an unsettled dispute of long standing. In every age the first necessary step towards truth has been the renunciation of those soaring dreams of the human heart which strive to picture the cosmic frame as other and fairer than it appears to the eye of the impartial observer. And no doubt that which men are so ready to set in opposition to common knowledge as being a higher view of things, is but a kind of prophetic yearning, which, though well aware of the limits that it seeks to transcend, knows but little of the goal that it would reach. Such views, indeed, though they have their source in the best part of our nature, receive their distinctive character and colouring from very various influences. Fed by many doubts and reflections concerning the destinies of life and drawn from a range of experience that at the best is limited, they neither escape the influences of transmitted culture and temporary tendencies, nor are they even independent of those natural changes of mental mood which take place in men, and are different in youth from what they are after the accumulation of manifold experiences. This book considers the following question: What significance have man, and human life with its constant phenomena, and the changing course of history, in the great whole of Nature, in the steady influence of which the results of modern science have made us feel more than ever in subjection"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
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