Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/17

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xii
PREFACE.

able. Of these one was among the first of the German thinkers in the chance order of the author's early reading, the other was deeply influential both by his spoken words and by his writings; the former is that brilliant and stimulating master of contradictions, Schopenhauer, the other is the now departed Lotze, whose lectures the author will never forget nor disregard, although what is here taught is remote enough from most of Lotze's system.

In outer form this work may be considered by the philosophic student as a sort of roughly sketched and very incomplete Phenomenology of the religious consciousness, first on its moral, and then on its theoretical, side. The parts of the argument that the author supposes to contain most relative originality will be found in Book I., Chapters VI. and VII., and in Book II., Chapter XI. On these chapters all else hinges.

The discussion of the Problem of Evil, as it appears in Chapter XII., is, as the author has seen only since that chapter was in type, very closely parallel to part of the discussion of the same question in the new second edition of Pfleiderer's "Religionsphilosophie." Yet, as the thoughts of this new edition of Pfleiderer's argument were indicated in his first edition, although not so clearly expressed, the author claims little originality here, save in the form of