Religion and Science from Galileo to Bergson

The author traces the evolving relationship between religious attitude and scientific knowledge from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. Beginning with the collapse of medieval syntheses under astronomical and mechanical discoveries, the narrative follows the rise of mechanistic natural philosophy and its critics, surveys reactions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, and examines Kantian and German idealist responses. It considers Romantic and English idealist revivals, the impact of evolutionary biology and scientific materialism, and later philosophical and scientific shifts associated with pragmatism, Bergson, Mach, and neo-vitalist or spiritualist currents. The work concludes that spiritual interpretations of reality repeatedly reassert themselves and calls for intellectual freedom for both religion and science.