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Mimeographed and hand-edited draft of Theodore Roosevelt’s typed manuscript for his theological essay “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” which was published by Charles Scribner's Sons as the ninth chapter in Roosevelt’s 1913 work History as Literature and Other Essays. The mimeographed manuscript, 27 pages, 8.5 x 10.5, no date, contains both pencil notations and facsimile notations, the latter of which were made by Roosevelt on a previous draft and appear darker in contrast. Roosevelt, who changed the essay’s original title from “The Search for Truth in Science and Religion” to its final form, reflects Roosevelt's views on the interplay of faith, reason, and morality. In the opening section, he champions the possibility of retaining religious feeling in the face of scientific progress against those who claim that one or the other must be chosen exclusively. His intelligence and rhetorical skill are prominent throughout this section, which he begins: “There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.” In very good to fine condition, with edgewear and a couple of small stains.
