events in history. Not without interest will the
reader remark that the subjects offer themselves to us now as they did
to the old philosophers of Greece. We still deal with the same questions
about which they disputed. What is God? What is the soul? What is the
world? How is it governed? Have we any standard or criterion of truth?
And the thoughtful reader will earnestly ask, "Are our solutions of
these problems any better than theirs?"

The general argument of this book, then, is as follows:

I first direct attention to the origin of modern science as
distinguished from ancient, by depending on observation, experiment,
and mathematical discussion, instead of mere speculation, and shall show
that it was a consequence of the Macedonian campaigns, which brought
Asia and Europe into contact. A brief sketch of those campaigns, and of
the Museum of Alexandria, illustrates its character.

Then with brevity I recall the well-known origin of Christianity, and
show its advance to the attainment of imperial power, the transformation
it underwent by its incorporation with paganism, the existing religion
of the Roman Empire. A clear conception of its incompatibility with
science caused it to suppress forcibly the Schools of Alexandria. It was
constrained to this by the political necessities of its position.

The parties to the conflict thus placed, I next relate the story of
their first open struggle; it is the first or Southern Reformation. The
point in dispute had respect to the nature of God. It involved the rise
of Mohammedanism. Its result was, that much of Asia and Africa, with the
historic cities Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage, were wrenched from
Christendom, and the doctrine of the Unity of God established in the
larger portion of what had been the Roman Empire.

This political event was followed by the restoration of science, the
establishment of colleges, schools, libraries, throughout the dominions
of the Arabians. Those conquerors, pressing forward rapidly in their
intellectual development, rejected the anthropomorphic ideas of the
nature of God remaining in their popular belief, and accepted other more
philosophical ones, akin to those that had long previously been attained
to in India. The result of this was a second conflict, that respecting
the nature of the soul. Under the designation of Averroism, there came
into prominence the theories of Emanation and Absorption. At the
close of the middle ages the In