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the nerves of motion and sense from the spinal chord and paralysis ensues; the whole man speedily falls to pieces when the soul is gone. Above all, in such a state of things the will ceases to be free. If it were an original, independent causality, it would be a noumenon indeed. It was by the will that Kant had hoped to regain what the speculative intellect had lost. There he placed the unconditioned, since by his will man determines himself out of his own spiritual being. This looked like a possible foundation for an ontology; but our hopes are frustrated by his assertion that this self-determination can tell us nothing about objects; it cannot tell us what we are, but what we ought to be. The will is a blind faculty, and the magnificent prospect which it promises us into a world beyond sense and self, turns out to be an intellectual fallacy. There the fault in our inmost being appears again, and the crystal which looked clear in its unity, presents a point where it may be cleft. A function weighted by antinomies and not justified by the intellect, cannot stand alone. After all, the will is but a faculty, and till we are told of what it is a faculty, it is a portent going about the world loose, unclaimed, and without an owner; while in Germany its function is merged into the absolute Ego of Fichte, in England it is broken up into states of consciousness, and lies at the mercy of motives and desires. Among dominant English thinkers free will has disappeared. In the doctrine of Evolution, man becomes the slave of inherited dispositions. This is the whole tendency of the age. All that we have said is embodied in a sentence of a book, which, amidst all the demerits of its cynicism, has at least the merit of plainspokenness-we mean Strauss's "Old and New Faith." The whole result of modern philosophy is thus summed up. After some materialistic sentences he adds, "If one strives in these words to find clearly expressed a cynical materialism, I have nothing to say against it. Practically, I have always considered the opposition about which so much noise has been made, materialism and idealism to be a question of words. The real enemy of both is the dualism of that Christian view of the world which splits up man into body and soul, and separates his existence into time and eternity, and which places an eternal God-Creator over against the created and transitory world. To this dualistic view of the world, idealism as well as materialism stands in the same relation; they are both forms of monism, that is, they seek to explain the complex of phenomena out of one only principle, to represent to themselves the world and life as made of one piece."*

"Der alte und der neue Glaube," p. 212.

It is as a sacrifice to this one principle that thought becomes a mechanism subordinated to sense, and that will is the slave of antecedents. The great merit of Darwin's theory is said to be that "it shows how adaptation of means to ends in organisms can take place without any mixture of intelligence through the blind operation of a natural law." All teleology is treated as summarily as the miraculous in theology, for both imply will. "Final cause is your great miracle-monger in nature." There is but one great kingdom, and that is nature. This, then, according to Strauss, is the outcome of Kant's idealism. Notwithstanding Kant's view of the majesty of the moral law, neither the soul of man nor the God of practical reason has been able to survive the destruction of ontology.

In this state of things those men deserve a crown of some kind who have "not despaired of the republic." Men who have stood up for everything that is great in the natural order, for all that the Church declares can be proved by human reason, the existence of God, the free-will of man, and the immortality of the soul, deserve her thanks. It requires some intellectual courage to stem the current of the thought of the age in which we live. This is what has been done in the two collections of Essays which we have placed at the head of this article. There we have the remarkable fact that men without even so much of Aristotelian training as was given at Oxford, have spent their lives in a stand for ontology as opposed to phenomenism. That Mr. Martineau is no direct disciple of Aristotle, respectfully as he ever speaks of him, is quite evident from his criticism on "form," where, indeed, it seems to us that he makes a mistake in his view of Aristotle's meaning. Nevertheless, the old division of mental sciences, psychology, logic, metaphysics, and ontology, is brought back in triumph by one intimately acquainted with modern philosophhy from the polemics of Kant to the thin logic of Mr. Mill. In all great questions, such as the reality of substance and causation, the conception of classes or "kinds," and above all the theory of reasoning, Mr. Martineau returns to the conclusions of the old philosophy. A man's views with respect to the validity of the syllogism as opposed to simply inductive logic, are a crucial test of his philosophic tendencies, and here Mr. Martineau is a conscious defender of Aristotle. The remarkable circumstance of all this is precisely that all this return to ancient thought has taken place by entirely modern methods. As we have already seen, the objective reality of thought, the Externality of the world, the validity of the causal nexus, were all taken for granted in the old philosophy; but we find all these problems grappled with in the pages which we have

before us. Modern philosophy is fought with on its own ground, and by its own weapons. In this terribly distracted and much abused century in which we live, we must confess that we see one virtue, and that is, a passionate worship of facts as opposed to theories. That the worship at times becomes idolatrous we quite allow. Yet we must confess that we have ourselves a great weakness for facts. The misery of the age is that it ignores all the deepest facts of human nature. It is precisely on these that Mr. Martineau, and especially Mr. Hutton, have taken their stand. While the former excels above all in clear exposition and in a rare power of imparting an almost dramatic life to the abstrusest subject, the latter brings to the help of God's cause a most remarkably subtle analysis of precisely those facts of human nature which modern thought can only account for by disputing, can only get over by ignoring. After all, it seems to us to be the most valuable quality in these writers, that they not only agree in fundamentals with the ancient schools, but also that they precisely unfold those truths which wanted developing in the schoolmen, and which have been developed by later Christian writers, such as Father Kleutgen. It is much that they should have bent all their energies to prove what Aristotle held long ago, and what Kant and his successors destroyed-the truth that man knows reality and not phenomena alone. But it is more remarkable that their progress has been parallel to, not in opposition to, that of the Catholic schools. That the scholastic doctrines required to be perfected and developed, especially in the philosophical account of the causal nexus, is acknowledged by their warmest admirer and defender.* Both Kleutgen and Mr. Martineau have employed themselves in connecting the origin of the notion of cause with the exercise of our own spontaneous activity, whether of intellect or will. Again, a diligent reader of S. Thomas, who studies with all the affection and admiration which such a great saint and thinker deserves, will especially long for an explanation of that synderesis, the existence of which he fully acknowledges and yet has not sufficiently analyzed. We long to know what are those principles of the intellect and conscience which so lie at the root of all our mental and moral operations, and which are so immediate that he calls them innate, because they are not susceptible of proof, and require none, since they are lit up by their own truth. Every student of the " Philosophy of the Olden Time" will recollect how large a part of the book is devoted to an elucidation of first principles, and a reader of

VOL. XX.-NO. XL.

*Kleutgen, 302.
[New Series.]

Y

the Essays which lie before us, will remember that the very truth for which, more than others, their authors have fought, is the existence, in the human intellect, of a power of intuition. We fully admit that probably there would be a question between the Catholic and Protestant writers as to the number of such principles; but there would be no difference of opinion as to the fact that "all knowledge implies intuition (schauen), that is, immediate knowledge of first principles."* Even on a question which Mr. Hutton treats with great eloquence and acuteness, the proof of the existence of God, there is a real and profound agreement, though several of his expressions would not have been written by a Catholic philosopher.

It is startling to find him suppose that an Atheist can be in a state of invincible ignorance. It is still more surprising to find him speaking as if there could be no scientific proof of that great truth. We cannot think that he can really mean what his words seem to say, for he himself, in these striking essays, has furnished demonstrations of God's existence as novel as they are forcible. The real fact is that the arguments which he uses are rather moral than metaphysical. Yet even here a change has come over the spirit of our philosophy. Though Catholic writers still clearly assert that the old cosmological arguments are valid, yet there is in Kleutgen a manifest disposition to complete the proofs of God's personality by proofs drawn from the conscience and from man's moral nature. Less stress is laid upon any one argument, and more upon the cumulus of the whole. In answering an objection of Hermes that one of the common arguments from design is not inconsistent with the notion oft a God immanent in the universe, Kleutgen answers it, not by denying the fact, but by pointing out that other arguments lie under the same. defect, and require to be eked out by proofs of another kind. He allows that some demonstrations of God's existence are by themselves of no avail against Pantheists. "That," he adds, "which is requisite to make an argument for the existence of God valid, is only that the being whose existence is proved should be no other than the one true God: it is not requisite that this should be clearly brought out by this proof alone." In the same place he defends the traditional arguments on the ground that they "furnish elements, by the development of which men may be led to a definite knowledge "of God's personality. It is plain that the principle of cumulative evidence is here recognized, and that no fault can be found with those who consider any one proof by itself incomplete.

Klentgen, 333.

† Ibid., 921.

Ibid., 924.

There is, however, a better way of defending Mr. Hutton. It is an undoubted fact that the enormous majority of men believe in God without any scientific demonstration of His existence at all. We find ourselves believers in God as we awake to the fact that we are the children of our mothers. There is no point of time which can be called the dawn of reason, and if there were, there is no break of continuity, not a moment's suspension of judgment, when we arrive at its use, and no questioning of the spirit whether we are right in believing in God. We continue to believe in Him as we continue to breathe, without reflecting on the mechanism of the lungs. Thus it happens that when in after-life the few, who are capable of it, apply acquired science to the proof of God's existence, the reasons, which they find, most inadequately represent the reasons why they believed. They need not be those which convinced them at all. At its very best, logic is only an imperfect representation of the arguments which help to carry conviction to the intellect: it can only reproduce the dry bones even of these, and conviction is the work of the whole living man. After all, the modes in which an infinite spirit presents Himself to the intellect and finds His way into the deep heart of a creature, are more subtle and delicate than the many speechless looks and unreasoning indications by which the news of the love of one human being is conveyed to another, and equally defy analysis. Let any one sit down and try to find the middle term of a passionate burst of beautiful music. It is possible for a man to accept God as the conclusion of a syllogism; but did any of us ever meet with such a one, or ever hear of him? It is this unreasoning knowledge of God which Ontologism has caricatured and distorted. S. Anselm, a saint whose mind was as profound as his soul was loving, saw and felt it, and only made the blunder of attempting to put it into a formal process with mood and figure. It is chiefly on this unscientific conviction of God's existence, a persuasion too deep for words, too boundless even for thought, that Mr. Hutton dwells. We wish that we had space to quote some of those pages in which, with a vein of indignant emotion, he pierces the firmament of hard brass with which Agnosticism would surround the universe. What we would point out here is the fact that modern theologians insist far more than has ever been done since patristic times, on this very unscientific knowledge of God. We apprehend that this kind of conviction is the "assent" which Father Newman, whose doctrine some most absurdly connect with Kant, has disjoined from reasoning, in a famous book which seems to us to be not so much in opposi

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