Naturalism and Religion Author:Rudolf Otto 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: CHAPTER III FUNDAMENTAL PEINCIPLBS The fundamental convictions of naturalism, its general tendencies, and the points of view which determine its outlook, a... more »re primarily related to that order of facts which forms the subject of the natural sciences, to " Nature." It is only secondarily that it attempts to penetrate with the methods of the natural sciences into the region of the conscious, of the mind, into the domain that underlies the mental sciences, including history and the aesthetic, political, and religious sciences, and to show that, in this region as in the other, natural law and the same principles of interpretation obtain, that here, too, the " materialistic conception of history holds true, and that there is no autonomy of mind." The interests of religion here go hand in hand with those of the mental sciences, in so far as these claim to be distinct and independent. For the question is altogether one of the reality, pre-eminence, and independence of the spiritual as opposed to the " natural." Occasionally it has been thought that the whole problem of the relations between religion and naturalism was concentrated on this point, and the study of nature hasbeen left to naturalism as if it were indifferent or even hopeless, thus leaving a free field for theories of all kinds, the materialistic included. It is only in regard to the Darwinian theory of evolution and the mechanical theory of the origin and nature of life, and particularly in regard to the relatively unimportant question of " spontaneous generation" that a livelier interest is usually awakened. But these isolated theories are only a part of the " reduction," which is characteristic of naturalism, and they can only be rightly estimated and understood in connection with it. We shall turn our attention to t...« less