Synopses & Reviews
Cambridge English Prose Texts consists of volumes devoted to substantial selections from non-fictional English prose of the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The series provides students, primarily though not exclusively those of English literature, with the opportunity of reading significant prose writers who, for a variety of reasons (not least their generally being unavailable in suitable editions) are rarely studied, but whose influence on their times was very considerable. This volume contains selections from nineteenth-century writers involved in the debate about the relation of science and religion. It centres on the Darwinian controversy, with extracts from The Origin Of Species and The Descent of Man, and from opponents and supporters of Darwin. This controversy is placed in the wider context of the earlier debates on geology and evolution; the relation of science to Natural Theology; the effect of Biblical Criticism on the interpretation of Genesis; and the professionalisation of science by aggressively agnostic scientists.
Table of Contents
1. Natural Theology (1802), Chapters 1-3 William Paley; 2. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), Chapter 14, 'Hypothesis of the Development of the Vegetable and Animal Kingdoms' Robert Chambers; 3. The Testimony of the Rocks (1857), Lecture Fifth, 'Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies', Part I Hugh Miller; 4. On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter 14, 'Recapitulation and Conclusion' Charles Darwin; 5. 'On the Mosaic Cosmogony', Essays and Reviews (1860) Charles Goodwin; 6. Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (1903), vol. 1, Chapter 1,'1859-1860' Leonard Huxley; 7. The Descent of Man (1871), Chapter 21, `General Summary and Conclusion' Charles Darwin; 8. 'The Belfast Address', Nature, 20 August 1874 John Tyndall; 9. The Relations between Religion and Science (1884.), Lecture VI, 'Apparent Collision between Religion and the Doctrine of Evolution'; and Lecture VIII, `The Conclusion of the Argument' Frederick Temple.