"Through Nature to God" by John Fiske, published by Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1899, First Edition.

Hard boards, original red cloth [bent front board: see photos]; , gold lettering on spine [a little wear]; 4.3/4" x 7"; 195 pages + colophon + 4-page ads by the publisher, very good condition.

"SINGLE purpose runs throughout this little book, though different aspects of it are treated in the three several parts. The first part, "The Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The Idea of God," was designed to supply some considerations which for the sake of conciseness had been omitted from that book. Its close kinship with the second part, "The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self-Sacrifice," will be at once apparent to the reader...

That second part is, with a few slight changes, the Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered by me at Harvard University, in June, 1895. Its original title was "Ethics in the Cosmic Process," and its form of statement was partly determined by the fact that it was intended as a reply to Huxley's famous Romanes lecture delivered at the University of Oxford in 1893. Readers of "The Destiny of Man" will observe that I have here repeated a portion of the argument of that book. The detection of the part played by the lengthening of infancy in the genesis of the human race is my own especial contribution to the Doctrine of Evolution, so that I naturally feel somewhat uncertain as to how far that subject is generally understood, and how far a brief allusion to it will suffice. It therefore seemed best to recapitulate the argument while indicating its bearing upon the ethics of the Cosmic Process...

In the third part of the present little book, "The Everlasting Reality of Religion," my aim is to show that "that other influence," that inward conviction, the craving for a final cause, the theistic assumption, is itself one of the master facts of the universe, and as much entitled to respect as any fact in physical nature can possibly be. The argument flashed upon me about ten years ago, while reading Herbert Spencer's controversy with Frederic Harrison concerning the nature and reality of religion. Because Spencer derived historically the greater part of the modern belief in an Unseen World from the savage's primeval world of dreams and ghosts, some of his critics maintained that logical consistency required him to dismiss the modern belief as utterly false; otherwise he would be guilty of seeking to evolve truth from falsehood. By no means, replied Spencer : "Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the religious consciousness is the final development of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors." This suggestion has borne fruit in the third part of the present volume, where I have introduced a wholly new line of argument to show that the Doctrine of Evolution, properly understood, does not leave the scales equally balanced between Materialism and Theism, but irredeemably discredits the former, while it places the latter upon a firmer foundation than it has ever before occupied...[excerpts from the Preface]

John Fiske (1842-1901) was an American philosopher and historian.

US: Priority (c.2-4 days) ------------- $12.50
Canada: 1st Class (c.2-6 weeks) ----- $26.50
World: 1st Class (c.2-8 weeks) ------ $34.50