Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE OBIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN GOD. Space is the form of the material universe. But all that is, physical and psychical alike, exists in time, and in time has come to be what it now is. To understand the nature of things, therefore, we must see, not only the completed result, but the entire succession of phases of which it is the final outcome. This is the justification of that historical method which has been so fruitfully applied to the sciences during the present century, transforming them, from a miscellany of superficial observations, into a progressive and systematic record of the ever-unfolding drama of the world. Evolutionary science is the name ordinarily given to this new historical knowledge of nature. But the same method has been carried into our study of man — the province of history in its narrower sense. Andwe bind together all our knowledge of human thinking, doing, and suffering, by this modern conception of gradual development. So far, indeed, has this excellent method been pushed that some philosophers have supposed themselves to be describing the nature of things when they were only enumerating the circumstances that favored the development of them. And it has been widely assumed that certain beliefs lost their validity when once the history of their origin and growth had been discovered. But the faults arising from the misinterpretation of a principle are not to be charged to the principle itself. Whatever erroneous inferences have been drawn by this or that evolutionist, the soundness of the evolutionary method remains intact. That method is based on the fact that all existences, all objects of thought or inquiry, are in a state of becoming. And this process is-a series of changes in time. The evolutionary or historical method,...