(3) With literature, at the Renaissance, in Italy (1400-1625). (p. [9].)
(4) With modern philosophy in three forms (p. [11]): viz. English Deism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. [11]); French Infidelity in the eighteenth century; German Rationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
Proposal to study the natural as well as literary history of these forms of doubt.—The investigation separated from inquiries into heresy as distinct from scepticism. (p. [13].)
The causes, seen to act according to the law just described, which make free thought develope into unbelief, stated to be twofold. (p. [13].)
1. Emotional causes.—Necessity for showing the relation of the intellectual causes to the emotional, both per se, and because the idea of a history of thought, together with the comparative rarity of the process here undertaken, implies the restriction of the attention mainly to the intellectual. (p. [13].)
Influence of the emotional causes shown, both from psychology and from the analysis of the nature of the evidence offered in religion (pp. [14], [15]).—Historical illustrations of their influence. (pp. [15-17].)
Other instances where the doubt is in origin purely intellectual (p. [17]), but where nevertheless opportunity is seen for the latent operation of the emotional. (p. [18].)
Explanation how far religious doubt is sin. (pp. [19], [20].)
2. Intellectual causes, which are the chief subject of these lectures; the conjoint influence however of the emotional being always presupposed.
The intellectual causes shown to be (p. [20]):