Henry Maudsley

Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings Henry Maudsley

The text has therefore been revised throughout, modified and added to in parts, and mostly rewritten. A full index has also been added. It will not be out of place to premise summarily two elementary truths, the grounds of which are found set forth at length in the general argument. Obvious as they might appear, it is strange to see how commonly they are ignored. The first is that an attack on supematuralism, however absolute, is not an attack on religion. Systems of theology are one thing religion is another thing; and as the social progress of mankind implies such principles of binding morality as are essential religion, they have necessarily always existed and developed where that progress has taken place, whatever the fixed and exclusive tenets of the particular supernatural theory in vogue at the time and place: they belong to no creed exclusively. To look forward, as some persons wistfully do, to the discovery of a new religion is no wiser, perhaps, tlui it would be to look forward to the invention of a new multiplication-table. What is wanted really is not a new religion, but the power or will to see and acknowledge the principle, and trace the evolution, of the religion which has always been at work in the processes of what men are agreed to call human progress.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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