Abstract
It is difficult to over estimate the impact of science and the empirical method on the study of philosophy and religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One need only mention the names of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin to get some sense of the growing trend away from the ideal world to the empirical world. The image of the empirical world was also changing. The static universe of the eighteenth century, which had been widely challenged, received a death blow in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. The sense of development or evolution, when combined with the growth of the sciences and the rejection of metaphysical inquiry, produced thinkers who looked more to science than religion or speculative philosophy to solve human problems. Some of the leading thinkers during this period were not philosophers in the usual sense of the word. They were physiologists, biologists and social scientists. Some were narrowly positivistic and some were less so.
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Notes
William Kingdom Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn. (London, Macmillan, 1886), p. 340.
Ibid., p. 346.
Ibid., p. 360.
Ibid., p. 373.
Ibid., p. 409.
Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, Part I (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1901), p. 14.
Karl Pearson, The Ethic of Freethought (London: Charles Adam and Black, 1887), p. vii.
Ibid., p. 46. The expression, Bridgewater Treatises, refers to a set of treatises written by scientists in the 1830s following the intentions of the Earl of Bridgewater to “explain the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in creation,” Some of these were ridiculed and said to go far beyond the imagination of William Paley.
Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1905), p. 6.
Ibid., p. 182.
Ibid., p. 291.
Friedrich Max Müller, Natural Religion (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1889), p. 188.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 572.
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1929), Vol. I, p. 428.
Ibid., p. 426.
Ibid., p. 428.
Ibid., p. 500.
Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 108–109.
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, A New Abridgement (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 46.
Ibid., p. 806.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), p. 17.
Ibid., pp. 60–61.
Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), p. 232.
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 5.
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 62.
Ibid., p. 236.
Ibid., p. 470.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 112.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Near Religion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956).
Peter Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, in Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), pp. 80–81.
Ibid., p. 82.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., pp. 20–21.
Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 90.
Ibid., pp. 112–113.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Long, E.T. (2000). Positivism and the Science of Religion. In: Twentieth-Century Western Philosophy of Religion 1900–2000. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4064-5_6
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