Project Gutenberg 2025-10-09 Public domain in the USA. 439 Lippmann, Walter 1889 1974 29010228 A preface to morals $aNew York :$bThe Macmillan Company, $c1929. Sean/IB@DP "A preface to morals" by Walter Lippmann is a work of social and moral philosophy written in the early 20th century. It examines the modern loss of religious certainty and authority, the emptiness that can follow emancipation from orthodoxy, and the need to find a credible, disciplined humanism to guide conduct in a secular world. Lippmann probes why both triumphant disbelief and nostalgic return fail to satisfy, and why moral life requires more than taste, mood, or fashion. The opening of the book traces the “problem of unbelief”: those no longer anchored by ancestral faith feel aimless despite newfound freedoms, and the liberal prophecy of deliverance has disappointed, leaving people nervously credulous and tempted by new cults. Lippmann contrasts modernist redefinitions of God (abstract, symbolic, or metaphysical) that lack compelling authority with fundamentalist demands for literal historical facts; he shows how the former cannot sustain popular devotion, while the latter, lacking a sure arbiter, collapses into schism—Catholic critique included. He argues that higher criticism and “decoding” Scripture (e.g., turning immortality into a platonic ideal) strip religion of the certainty and external sanction that once consoled, commanded, and unified ordinary believers. Finally, he sketches the “acids of modernity”: shifting political analogies for God, urbanization, mobility, media-driven novelty, and the loss of familiar landmarks all corrode piety; fundamentalist agitation appears as anxious compensation for a confidence that has already ebbed. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-DSD-768/page/n5/mode/2up 20251002173532lippmann 1929 US en Philosophy and religion Ethics BJ Text 763864 2025-11-30T10:20:04.368069 text/html 698633 2025-10-09T20:47:47 text/html 336683 2025-11-30T10:20:14.854972 application/epub+zip 330854 2025-11-30T10:20:06.237995 application/epub+zip 330854 2025-11-30T10:20:05.242025 application/epub+zip 516557 2025-11-30T10:20:20.885457 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 457864 2025-11-30T10:20:13.887004 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 606940 2025-11-30T10:20:02.575021 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 587229 2025-10-09T20:47:47 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 15538 2025-11-30T10:20:21.257411 application/rdf+xml 5567 2025-11-30T10:20:05.452022 image/jpeg 1293 2025-11-30T10:20:05.347009 image/jpeg 275860 2025-11-30T10:20:04.424008 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia