Boston Monday Lectures. Conscience, with Preludes on Current Events.

Original publisher's green cloth binding with gilt lettering on spine. 5 1/4" x 7 3/4." 279 pages, complete. Twelve additional pages of advertisements for other published works by Joseph Cook in the back. Pages and covers are very clean and intact. Binding is tight. Excerpt from the Introduction: "The object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholarship on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relation of Religion and Science. They were begun in the Meionaon in 1875; and the audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the winter of 1876-77, and in that of 1877-78. . In the present volume some of the salient points are: -- 1. The definition of conscience as 'that which perceives and feels rightness and obligatoriness in choices' (p. 17). 2. A fuller definition (p. 25), together with a distinction between what conscience includes and what it implies (pp. 25-28). 3. A study (in Lectures II. and III.) of the relations of ethical and biological science, or of the effect of the approval and disapproval of conscience upon the countenance and gesture. 4. A reply (in Lectures IV., V., and VI.) to the agnosticism of Matthew Arnold. 5. A criticism (in Lecture VI.) of the positions of Mansel as to the definitions of the infinite and absolute. 6. A consideration (in Lectures VII. and VIII.) of conscience as the foundation of the religion of science. 7. A series (in Lectures IX. and X.) of literary illustrations of conscience from Victor Hugo and Shakespeare. The theory as to conscience advanced in these lectures is in general accord with the ethical school represented by Kant, Dugald Stuart [Stewart], Price and Edwards, and among later German writers, by Lotze, Wutke, Hofmann, Ulrici, and Rothe.".…