THE DUBLIN REVIEW. APRIL, 1873. ART. I.-THE RELATION OF SCHOLASTIC TO Die Philosophie der Vorzeit vertheidigt von JOSEPH KLEUTGEN, Priester der Gesellshaft Jesu. Münster, 1860. The Dialogues of Plato. Oxford, 1871. Translated by B. JOWETT, Master of Balliol College, Essays, Theological and Literary. By RICHARD H. HUTTON, M.A. London, 1871. Essays, Philosophical and Theological. By JAMES MARTINEAU. London, 1869. N the higher education of the members of most religious young Catholic there can be no question that it is a necessity. The Church has committed herself to the statement that it is possible for natural reason, quite apart from revelation, to prove the existence of God, the free-will of man, and the immortality of the soul. This implies an affirmation that there is such a science as philosophy, and that it belongs to a perfect education. It is plain that in the future English Catholic University, which must come sooner or later, philosophy must have a place. A university, whether it be one college or many, means a place where all sciences are taught; a philosophy therefore there must be. For many reasons it is furthermore plain, that the philosophy of the Church, as far as she has one, is scholastic.-We may take it for granted, therefore, that the scholastic philosophy will be taught at our university. There are, however, many other questions which will have to be answered when the time comes to establish that institution, and amongst them the foremost will be, what is to be done with modern philosophy? That it must be taught in some shape is plain, if only to be refuted. This teaching might take place in many ways. There might be a chair for VOL. XX.-NO. XL. [New Series.] U the History of Philosophy apart from that of philosophy itself. Or else, besides a professor of scholastic philosophy, there might be other professors licensed to give lectures on any systems' which they chose, subject to being deprived of their license if they propounded wrong doctrines. These are practical problems depending on the resolution of a theoretical question, as to the precise extent to which the Church has committed herself to the scholastic philosophy. Is that system to be considered as the absolute truth in such a sense that all others must be absolute falsehood? Or is it the best known calculus into which the truth can be cast without excluding other systems which convey the same truth in a different terminology and by an independent method? These are questions which the present article does not profess scientifically to decide. Its writer agrees perfectly with principles already laid down in this REVIEW. The scholastic philosophy is binding on the conscience of Christians as far as it is connected with theology, and no further; as a connected system, however, it seems to us the most consistent. A writer who, like Gunther, were to write professedly against the system into which the Church has cast the formulæ of many, though not of all her doctrines, and to accuse it of being semiPantheistic, would deserve condemnation. It still remains, however, to consider how far the connection of this philosophy with theology extends, and to what extent it admits of progress in itself, and of the existence of other systems by its side. Profound questions might be raised as to the theory and the meaning of philosophical truth. Our aim, however, is far short of this. We desire to make some historical contribution to the question by examining the present tendencies of English philosophy, and seeing whether there are thinkers amongst us, who, without being scholastic, can be hailed as defenders of the truth. We must confess that to us it would be a lamentable thing if we could descry nothing good in the present philosophy. We must indeed allow that modern philosophy as a whole has not distinguished itself. It has done nothing commensurate with the enormous ability and purity of intention of the man who founded it. All honour be to Kant for defending the eternity and majesty of the moral law against the frivolity of France, and the idea of causality against the scepticism of Scotland. But philosophy never recovered the shock which he gave it by looking upon the human personality as a phenomenon without a substance. In less than a hundred years this philosophy has run its course, and its outcome has been chaos. The aim of the transcendental method was to produce in mental science a universally received doctrine after the fashion of mathematics; its effect has been anarchy. The maxim of causality which it endeavoured to establish, is the very thing which it ruined, for we cannot but consider that Mr. Mill and Professor Huxley are the legitimate result of a system which destroys the validity of a priori truth, even while it establishes its existence. But does it follow from this that no progress has been made by this immense sifting of questions, by all this toil of thought? We cannot think so. Some questions, have been raised, if not solved, of which S. Thomas never dreamed, or which he only saw at fitful intervals, without discerning their importance. Must we say that all human thought has been arrested at a certain date? This would be but a bad compliment to the independent power which the Church has asserted to belong to the human intellect. Surely the very shock of the Church against the hard flinty stone of the Reformation must have elicited some light. We cannot believe that all modern thought comes of the devil, and rises out of the everlasting pit. This would be a miserable outlook. In that great stormy conflict thousands and tens of thousands of noble souls are struggling, and what chance have we of saving them if we hopelessly differ in first principles, if our very language is to them a foreign speech, if we have no thought in common? It is all very well to refute; the Church had far rather convert; and conversion is well nigh an impossibility if the modern world is utterly reprobate. Feeling as we do, we hail with pleasure the appearance of the two collections of essays mentioned at the head of this article. It is not to the credit of the candour or the profundity of the British reading public that volumes of such great literary ability and containing such traces of deep thought should not be better known. There is great reason, however, to think that the school to which these writers belong has more influence than is supposed, and that that influence is increasing. We hope to say much about them which will induce our readers to study them and judge for themselves. We are not, however, going to write a regular review. Our purpose is to use them as examples of thinkers absolutely independent of the schools, and whom yet we can look upon as advocates of truth. We trust that those most able writers will forgive us for using them for ends of our own. We wish to point out what we conceive to be the fundamental difference between Aristotelian or scholastic philosophy and modern thought, and how, nevertheless, writers essentially modern in their views have been led to return in part to older theories. In order to do this we must first ascertain what is Aristotelian and what is modern philosophy. In each case we intend to treat the matter historically, rather than scientifically. As specimens of the old philosophy we will take Aristotle and the eminent Jesuit Father Kleutgen; in like manner we will assume Kant and the above-mentioned writers to be respectively representatives of modern, and of what we take leave to call, reactionary philosophy. We will conclude with some remarks on Mr. Hutton's conception of the relations between Theology and Philosophy. In looking around us for allies it is strange for us to turn away from Oxford. None but those who have felt it can understand the fascination of Oxford, and how much it has cost some of us to give up the hope which flattered us, as we gazed in the '45 on its towers and spires, that the day might come when we might re-enter it in triumph. We owe some apology to Alma Mater for passing over to her philosophical enemies; and we therefore begin by giving our reasons for dissent, and we take Dr. Jowett's "Plato" as the type of her teaching. Of course we know full well that to talk of Plato and philosophy to the majority of those who have been sighing for Oxford is utterly beside the mark. To the generality that famous university was not a place of education at all, but a locality where their sons could form good connections, correct the awkward manners of boyhood, and acquire the polish of an English gentleman. What was Plato to such a one, or he to Plato? Amongst the advocates of Oxford, however, there were really conscientious parents feeling intensely their responsibilities, and asking anxiously where their children were to receive a higher education. To them the only valid answer is fully to acknowledge and sympathize with their dilemma, and to point out the fact that the Oxford education is bad, as education, besides being unfitted to prepare a Catholic for the battle of life. It is bad spiritually, because it teaches no positive truth; bad, as an intellectual gymnasium, because its tendency is to an atonic state of mind too weak to assimilate truth. Of this the book before us is a sufficient instance. We must confess that Dr. Jowett's introductions are most delightful to our lower nature. If the reader is one who has suffered under the attempt to master the most learned Brucker's "History of Philosophy," he will understand the pleasure of emerging from that bewildering fog into the intelligible method of the Master of Balliol. Time was when Empedocles and Parmenides, Protagoras and Socrates stood in our minds for certain empty formulæ, unintelligible to us because the whole spirit of Hellenic thought had evaporated from them; in the pages of Dr. Jowett they are living men, and their dicta are stages in the grand development of thought, steps in the progress of mankind. The charm of the writer consists in his power of throwing himself into that strange Greek life, with all its intellectual activity and its worship of physical beauty; he can enter into, while he condemns, its very crimes. With what marvellous facility he understands the state of things when men began, independently of tradition, to reflect on the universe, that chaotic time when logic was notwhen metaphysic was in its infancy, and men in their simplicity took all words for thoughts and all thoughts for things. What a Rembrandt-light he throws on the Silenus mask of the face of Socrates, the "paradoxical, ironical, tiresome" old man; yet amidst all his caustic humour, illuminated from within by a touch of beautiful sadness, as of one forecasting his approaching doom, which he will not avert by anything mean or low. With Dr. Jowett's help we even feel a certain pity for the Athenians, bored by this "gadfly," a man fearless of consequences, overpowering in intellect, in season and out of season forcing them to think, and to look facts in the face, merciless to conceit, till they gave him up to the conservative Anytus, a sort of Attic Newdegate, and put him to death. We can see how even an Aristophanes could mistake for a Sophist the most subtle but the least sophistical of men, one who saw that the old Athens of Eschylus and Marathon had passed away and become rotten, that the city of the violet crown had lost its savour, that what has been called the dispensation of paganism was a worn-out formula, and that the State, once the nurse of heroes, could no longer mould men, a man finally who had a clear insight into the fact that the individual was now to come forth and assert his consciousness in the place of the State, which once absorbed him, and to find a rest for his feet in the great ideas of morality which he could discover within himself. Strange that mankind should have put to death the first man who bade them look into themselves, and who claimed something like a supernatural mission to preach on judgment to come and on the will of God. The fact was that he looked like a sophist because he professed to know nothing, and upset men's pretended and traditional knowledge with his pitiless dialectic. He was not, however, a sophist; for to be a real sophist he should have professed the unknowable, not the unknown. He bade each individual not despair, but aspire after the mysterious God, who reveals Himself in the deepest aspirations of the heart; he was the apostle of the unknown God, of whose being he knew enough to die for Him. But the man of whom, after all, we learn most, and with whom we have, as it were a personal acquaintance in Dr. Jowett's book, is Plato. There |