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: PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. In this edition no alterations have been made; only the misprints, and some few faulty expressions, have been amended. One or two additional notes have been subjoined to the text. They are indicated by a star, thus. Those in the old edition bore a cross f. Touching the title of the book (religion Within The Bounds Of Naked Reason, for it seems I have been accused of some latent design), I beg leave to say in explanation, that since a Revelation may comprehend inter alia as its object-matter the doctrines of Natural ReliGion, while, conversely, this last cannot possibly contain the historical details of the former, it may be permitted ug to regard the one as a larger sphere of belief, containing within it the other as a less (i. e. as orbs concentric, consequently not without and outside of one another). Within the bounds of this last—the smaller sphere—may the philosopher, as an inquirer into pure reason, proceeding singly upon principles a priori, confine himself; where, consequently, he must abstract from all experience and observation. Leaving this position, he may make thefarther experiment of beginning at any supposed revelation (abstracting in the meanwhile from pure natural Religion, as an independent and self-subsisting system), and of holding it, as a historical system, bit by bit, up to the moral notions, for the purpose of comparison ; in order to see if it do not lead back eventually to the self-same system of Natural Theology, which, though incomplete in itself in a theoretical point of view (for it would require to embrace and contain a tcchnico-practical part, for the purpose of instruction), is, nevertheless, for every ethico- practical purpose, complete, and quite sufficient for religion properly so called; which, as a notio...