Confict Thesis Category

George Sarton’s Appeal to Andrew D. White

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Belgian historian of science, founder of the review journal Isis, and secular humanist George Sarton (1884-1956), emigrated to the United States. One of his earliest publications on the discipline of history of science appeared in the philosophical journal Monist, which was an English translation of his […]

Read More

The Failed Project of the New Religion

In 1884 Hebert Spencer published his “Religious Retrospect and Prospect” in the Popular Science Monthly, which appeared simultaneously in the Nineteenth Century. In this article Spencer offered an evolutionary account of the “religious consciousness.” By looking at its evolutionary history, Spencer believed he could infer the religious ideas and sentiments of the future. Importantly, he […]

Read More

McCabe and the Land of Bunk

Joseph McCabe (1867-1955), a Roman Catholic monk who abandoned his religious beliefs around 1895, was a prolific author, writing over two hundred books on science, history, biography, and religion. Historians of science and religion have largely ignored McCabe, and it is unclear why. But if historians are looking for the intellectual forebears of the so-called […]

Read More

Little Blue Books

Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), a socialist reformer and newspaper publisher, began publishing his five-cent, papered-covered “Little Blue Books” series in 1919. Small, inexpensive staple-bound and extremely popular, the Little Blue Books reached both educated and working-class readers. The series included novels, how-to manuals, short essays on politics, philosophy, history, and science, but also covered more controversial topic such as […]

Read More

The Political Effect of the Decline of Faith in Continental Europe

In one of the last published pieces of his career, John William Draper returned to a topic he had briefly touched upon in both his Intellectual Development of Europe and his History of the Conflict. Published in the Princeton Review in 1879, Draper addresses the “political effect of the decline of faith in continental Europe.” He asks, “When comes […]

Read More

1885 New York Mail and Express Interview of Andrew Dickson White

In 1885 the New York newspaper Mail and Express interviewed Cornell University President Andrew Dickson White. One of the main topics of discussion was, unsurprisingly, science and religion. The interview was republished in the Cornell Daily Sun, the University school newspaper. When he was asked if the teachings of Huxley and Tyndall had any “serious effect on […]

Read More

John W. Draper as Protestant Historian

In his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), Draper commences his historical review of the interactions between science and religion by declaring that “modern science” was born in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, and indicates that Alexandria, particularly its Museum, was the first civilization to pursue a “practical interrogation of […]

Read More

George Lincoln Burr and the Progress of Religion

George Lincoln Burr (1857-1938), historian and librarian at Cornell University, was also a close collaborator of Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918). White had even once proposed that Burr share with him the title page of his  A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Burr declined, but the suggestion shows that both […]

Read More

John W. Draper on Natural Law and Providence

Descartes viewed nature as created by a wise Creator, who had created the universe from nothing and let it run, like a machine, by itself. That is, there was no need for God to constantly intervene. By contrast, Gassendi believed that the laws we discover in nature are our laws, not God’s, and therefore he […]

Read More

Joachim and Draper

A number of historians of the idea of progress trace the notion to the mystic Joachim of Floris (1131-1202). Karl Löwith, in his classic Meaning in History (1949), believed that Joachim had delineated a “new scheme of epochs and dispensations by which the traditional scheme of religious progress from Old to the New Testament became extended and […]

Read More