Paul Carus

Paul Carus (German: [paʊl ˈkaːʁʊs]; 18 July 1852 – 11 February 1919) was a German-American author, editor, a student of comparative religion[1] and philosopher.

[7] In the United States, Carus briefly edited a German-language journal and wrote several articles for the Index, the Free Religious Association organ.

[3][8] He was introduced to Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of American Pragmatism, by Judge Francis C. Russell of Chicago.

He wrote books and articles on history, politics, philosophy, religion, logic, mathematics, anthropology, science, and social issues of his day.

In addition, Carus corresponded with many of the greatest minds of the late 19th and early 20th century, sending and receiving letters from Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ernst Mach, Ernst Haeckel, John Dewey, and many more.

For years afterwards, Carus was a strong sympathizer of Buddhist ideas, but stopped short of committing fully to this, or any other, religion.

After a battle for survival, he expected a "cosmic religion of universal truth" to emerge from the ashes of traditional beliefs.

"[13] Carus was a follower of Benedictus de Spinoza; he was of the opinion that Western thought had fallen into error early in its development in accepting the distinctions between body and mind and the material and the spiritual.

(Kant's phenomenal and noumenal realms of knowledge; Christianity's views of the soul and the body, and the natural and the supernatural).

He acknowledged Jesus Christ as a redeemer, but not as the only one, for he believed that other religious founders were equally endowed with similar qualities.

He differed with metaphysicians because they "reified" words and treated them as if they were realities, and he objected to materialism because it ignored or overlooked the importance of form.