Search -
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt: History as literature and other essays
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt History as literature and other essays Author:Theodore Roosevelt 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: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT THERE is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangero... more »us because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediaeval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth- century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind. This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackledmaterialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned below1 is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under the rather fanciful title of "The Death of the Swan" it deals with the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn. The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, an...« less