A History of Science and Its Relations with Philosophy and Religion

The original edition edition, which was first published in 1929 - The vast and imposing structure of modern science is perhaps the greatest triumph of the human mind. But the story of its origin its development and its achievements is one of the least known parts of the history, and has hardly yet found its way into general literature. Historians treat of war, of politics, of economics; but of the growth those activities which have revealed the individual atom and opened to our vision the depths of space, which have revolutionized philosophic thought and given us the means of advancing our material welfare to a level beyond the dreams of former ages, most of them tell us little or nothing. To the Greeks, philosophy and science were one, and in the Middle Ages, both were bound up with theology. The experimental method of studying nature, developed after the Renaissance, led to a separation; for, while natural and philosophy came to be based on Newtonian dynamics, the followers of Kant and Hegel led idealist philosophy away from contemporary science, which in turn, soon learned to ignore metaphysics. But evolutionary biology and modern mathematics and physics on the one hand have deepened scientific thought, and on the other have again forced philosophers to take account of science, which has now once more a meaning for philosophy, for theology, and for religion.