If any thing were needed to show us the untrustworthiness of artistic historical compositions, our personal experience would furnish it.  How often do our most intimate friends fail to perceive the real motives of our every-day actions; how frequently they misinterpret our intentions!  If this be the case in what is passing before our eyes, may we not be satisfied that it is impossible to comprehend justly the doings of persons who lived many years ago, and whom we have never seen.

In selecting and arranging the topics now to be presented, I have been guided in part by “the Confession” of the late Vatican Council, and in part by the order of events in history.  Not without interest will the reader remark that the subjects offer themselves to us now as they did to the old philosophers of Greece.  We still deal with the same questions about which they disputed.  What is God?  What is the soul?  What is the world?  How is it governed?  Have we any standard or criterion of truth?  And the thoughtful reader will earnestly ask, “Are our solutions of these problems any better than theirs?”

The general argument of this book, then, is as follows: 

I first direct attention to the origin of modern science as distinguished from ancient, by depending on observation, experiment, and mathematical discussion, instead of mere speculation, and shall show that it was a consequence of the Macedonian campaigns, which brought Asia and Europe into contact.  A brief sketch of those campaigns, and of the Museum of Alexandria, illustrates its character.

Then with brevity I recall the well-known origin of Christianity, and show its advance to the attainment of imperial power, the transformation it underwent by its incorporation with paganism, the existing religion of the Roman Empire.  A clear conception of its incompatibility with science caused it to suppress forcibly the Schools of Alexandria.  It was constrained to this by the political necessities of its position.

The parties to the conflict thus placed, I next relate the story of their first open struggle; it is the first or Southern Reformation.  The point in dispute had respect to the nature of God.  It involved the rise of Mohammedanism.  Its result was, that much of Asia and Africa, with the historic cities Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage, were wrenched from Christendom, and the doctrine of the Unity of God established in the larger portion of what had been the Roman Empire.

This political event was followed by the restoration of science, the establishment of colleges, schools, libraries, throughout the dominions of the Arabians.  Those conquerors, pressing forward rapidly in their intellectual development, rejected the anthropomorphic ideas of the nature of God remaining in their popular belief, and accepted other more philosophical ones, akin to those that had long previously been attained to in India.  The result of this was a second conflict, that respecting the nature of the soul.  Under the designation of Averroism, there came into prominence the theories of Emanation and Absorption.  At the close of the middle ages the Inquisition succeeded in excluding those doctrines from Europe, and now the Vatican Council has formally and solemnly anathematized them.