58 BRIEF STATEMENT. 



religious convictions. For the realization of this pur- 

 pose, the Open Court Company publishes two 

 periodicals, The Monist, a quarterly magazine devoted 

 to the philosophy of science, and The Open Court, an 

 illustrated monthly devoted to the science of religion 

 and the religion of science. In addition, the Open 

 Court Company publishes books that directly or in- 

 directly advance its aim books on Philosophy, which, 

 in contrast with the old metaphysicism, lay the 

 foundations of a philosophy of science ; books on the 

 history of philosophies ; books on mathematics and 

 other lines of thought which are indispensable for a 

 rational and scientific conception of the world ; books 

 that have a bearing on the doctrine of Evolution ; books 

 on the history of Religions, especially on the develop- 

 ment of Christianity and on Higher Criticism ; and 

 books on Comparative Religion, on Psychology, on 

 Education, and on Ethics. Above all, in all the works 

 careful, sympathetic, and scholarly criticism is aimed 

 at. Criticism is the joint result of love of Truth and 

 independence of thought ; rightly understood, it is not 

 only a preliminary to a work of synthesis, but it is part 

 of synthesis itself. No synthesis, in fact, is more than 

 a discovery of Truth : from past history we know that 

 syntheses have often blinded men to the Truth, though 

 that was naturally not their intention. 



On the subject of independence of thought it may 

 be proper shortly to refer to the work of Dr. Paul 

 Carus, who has been, since the end of 1887, closely 

 associated with the Open Court Company and its pub- 

 lications. Only two things need be said here. In the 

 first place, it was owing to the need he felt for keep- 

 ing his independence of thought that he resigned a 

 post in Germany and came, first to England and then 

 to America. In the second place, his views, which 

 are also, broadly speaking, the views for which the 

 Open Court Company works, may be characterized 

 both as monism and positivism, though his philosophy 

 differs considerably from Haeckel's monism, which is 



