After Bruno's death, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Descartes seemed about to take the leadership of human thought... in promoting….

Just as the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, and the Almig….

In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, h….

He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour..

The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promisi….

My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continent….

The last struggles of a great superstition are very frequently the worst..

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind..

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God..

A new danger now beset him [Grotius], the danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for th….

Carlyle uttered a pregnant truth when he said that the history of any country is in the biographies of the men who made it..

Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lowe….

The young man [Turgot] destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his ….

In an address before the "Academia," which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the ….

His [Turgot's] first important literary and scholastic effort was a treatise On the Existence of God. Few fragments of it remain, but we are helped t….

The establishment of Christianity . . . arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years..

The 'law of wills and causes,' formulated by Comte, . . . is that when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wi….

This whole theory [of John Law and Jean Terrasson], as dear to French financial schemers in the eighteenth century as to American "Greenbackers" in t….

Persons who clamor for governmental control of American railways should visit Germany, and above all Russia, to see how such control results. In Germ….

For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United Sta….

Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken by a persecution….