AND THE ORDINARY MAN A DISCUSSION OF SOME OF THE TEACHINGS FOREWORD To those good people who are so constituted that they can see nothing in aught save "facts, by which I assume that they mean that which can be verified by sight, hearing, smell, touch, or taste, my advice is frankly, that they lay this book down without attempting to read it, for to those so constituted, it will be sure to prove only a source of irritation. If, on the other hand, you are ready to admit with me that the world has only progressed through the exercise of faith in the direction of the things it has hoped for; if you can see that the great inventions and great discoveries of the world have always, prior to their existence "objectively" in consciousness, existed in the minds of men as things, which they inferred as possible because of pushing known facts to the limit of reason, and then exercising beyond the limits of reason a faculty which, for want of a better term, I have called in this book the "Faith which is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen"; if you are willing in your turn to exercise your reason to its limits, and then speculate from known facts to unknown, using Faith, the Bible, and Demonstration as your 355279 |