Vestiges of the book of nature

religious experience and hermeneutic practices in protestant German theology, ca. 1900

Bernhard Kleeberg

pp. 37-59

in: Uljana Feest (ed), Historical perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

His new 'scientific point of view," he wrote in 1859, built on the study of 'sensual things." "Evidence of experimental science" would ultimately lead to a new form of "consilience" that demonstrated "objective necessity" instead of "phantasmagoric ideas or arbitrary abstract reasoning." Natural scientists, philosophers and theologians had to acknowledge that there was but one universal ontology and epistemology, and that a new approach had set out to deal with any question thus arising.