Theosophy or Psychological Religion: The Gifford Lectures Delivered Before the University of Glasgow in 1892 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Theosophy or Psychological Religion: The Gifford Lectures Delivered Before the University of Glasgow in 1892

The discovery of God, the discovery of the Soul, and the discovery of the oneness of God and the Soul, such have been the three principal themes of my Gifford Lectures, and I have ventured to make at least an attempt to treat each of them, not simply as a philosopher, but as an historian. While the philosophy of religion treats the belief in a First Cause of the universe, and in an Ego or Self, and in the true relation between the two, as matters of psychological development, or of logical consecution, it was my purpose to show, not what the process of each of these discoveries may or must have been, but what it has been in the history of the world, so far as it is known to us at present. I am fully aware that this historical method is beset with grave difficulties, and has in consequence found but little favour in the eyes of speculative philosophers. So long as we look on the history of the human race as something that might or might not have been, we cannot wonder that the student of religion should prefer to form his opinions of the nature of religion and the laws of its growth from the masterwork of Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Sacrae Theologiae, rather than from the Sacred Books of the East.

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