DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The New Paul and Virginia; Or, Positivism on an Island" by W. H. Mallock. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Charles Cashdollar reinterprets nineteenth-century British and American Protestant thought by identifying positivism as the central intellectual issue of the era. Positivism meant, at first, the ideas of the French thinker Auguste Comte; later in the century, the term indicated a more general opposition to supernatural religion. Cashdollar shows that contemporary thinkers recognized positivism, at each of these stages, as the most fundamental of the proliferating challenges to religious belief. He further reveals how the encounter with positivism altered Protestant orthodoxy--in both subtle and radical ways. Positivists denied that humans could know anything other than physical phenomena. Declaring many orthodox beliefs archaic, they proposed a new, ethically based vision of service to humanity. After portraying the dissemination of these positions among British and American Protestants, the author explains how each of several groups reacted. A few theologians rejected positivism outright, but many more responded by recasting their own beliefs. The implications of this story of change extend to such topics as Darwinism, Biblical criticism, the rise of the social sciences, theological liberalism and the Social Gospel, the beginnings of fundamentalism, and the twentieth-century debate about "creationism" and science. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
"It is inconceivable even to imagine, let alone hope for, a dominant conservative movement in America without Kirk's labor." — WILLIAM F BUCKLEY "A profound critique of contemporary mass society, and a vivid and poetic image - not a program, an image - of how that society might better itself. [ The Conservative Mind ] is, in important respects, the twentieth century's own version of the Reflections on the Revolution in France... [Kirk] was an artist, a vsionary, almost a prophet." - DAVID FRUM, author of Dead Right "I have been one of your fans since the time many years ago when I read The Conservative Mind." - RICHARD NIXON "Dr. Russell Kirk's impact on conservative thought and policy in America has been decisive. It was his writings, and in particular his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, that laid the foundation for many of the ideas that continue to shape public discourse and debate to this day." - JOHN ENGLER, former Governer of Michigan "Kirk is assured a place of prominence in the intellectual histories for helping to define the ethical basis of conservatism. He has tried to pull conservatism away from the utilitarian premises of libertarianism, toward which conservatism often veers, toward a philosophy rooted in ethics and culture." - THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind is one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of significant figures representing the history of intellectual conservatism, The Conservative Mind launched the modern American Conservative Movement when it was first published in 1953 and has become an enduring classic of political thought. The seventh revised edition features the complete text and an introduction by publisher Henry Regnery. A must-read.
