Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957)

A book describing and answering isolationist arguments, written just before US entry into WW2 by an interventionist. Notable for treating seriously pacifist and social reformist isolationists and not lumping all isolationism together as fascist.

There are two ways to read a Bible: as if it is the proved remedy to which you confidently resort for the health of your soul, or as if it is another man's bible, to which he kneels at his sunset hour, and you 'ponder your heart next to his, and wait for the echo that will surely come'. Surely...[428].

'An Englishman may understand a Frenchman by becoming less English and more human. Similarly is it possible that a Christian may understand Mohammedanism by becoming less Christian and more show more religious.' [428]

Caution: A 'Parliament of Religions' was held at the Chicago World's Fair which did much to 'liberalize and broaden religious opinion in America'. But it encouraged the mistaken opinion that because all religions are equally religious they must be equally good or true.' {Not all religions are even religions; most are filled with fraud, many are compelled by force, and a few are genuinely pathological).

'To what universal fact does religion owe its existence? Is it perchance a fact concerning human nature?' [433]

'The root of religion: the attempt of man, conscious of his helplessness, to unite himself with the powers which do actually dominate. [436] Religion is a sense of need, a conviction of the insecurity of any merely worldly advantage that he may gain for himself, and a way of salvation through coming to terms with that which controls his destiny. Religion is both founded on fear and consummated in hope.' [437]

Monotheism is an exaltation of one god 'over all others' {never quite eliminating the 'others'}[438]. Buddhism is the 'godless religion'. [440]

'Life is an emergency, a crisis, or as William James has said, a 'forced option'. [Will to Believe, p. 3]'.[443]

Concludes with Moore's historically tight, but not theologically technical, explosion of Blaise Pascal's 'Letters' and 'Pensees'. The first is a masterpiece of sarcastic polemics on behalf of Jansenist fatalism and Augustinian original sin against the inroads of the friendly Jesuits. Unable to respond or even recover on theological grounds, the Jesuits managed to have the teachings of Bishop Jansen of Ypres (Belgium) declared heresy. France has never recovered. The Pensees, an incomplete product of the brevity, physical suffering, mental torture, and intellectual vigor of an all-embracing genius who was throwing himself into the non-existent impalpable and improbable arms of God [464]{solely because of mathematical probability theory and risk analysis}, which this 'terrifying genius' [Chateauxbriand's description] invented on the spot. show less

Addressing the rise of modern philosophy, "The great men of the age, so far as the future of philosophy is concerned, were not Pico [of Mirandola who founded a cult of Plato] and Pomponatius [who successfully defended the Alexandrist interpretation of Aristotle against the Averroist/ Orthodox interpretations], but Copernicus and Galileo." [149] Ever since, philosophy has been built, as if by Force, on Science, not the religious beliefs of men.

A magnificent tribute to its subject, and an essential work on William James.