From one point of view, this position should prove a source of strength. The thinkers who elaborated our system of Logic, were Scholastics. With the principles of that philosophy, its doctrines and its rules are in full accord. In the light of Scholasticism, the system is a connected whole; and the subjects, traditionally treated in it, have each of them its legitimate place.

When a philosopher adopts some other standpoint, it is inevitable that his Logic must be remodelled, if it is to be in harmony with his philosophical principles. For some parts of the traditional science, there will be no place in his scheme. And though these subjects may find treatment in his work, yet it will be manifest that they are present as unwelcome guests, only tolerated out of deference to custom and the exigencies of a popular demand. In such a case, a young student may well be excused, if he fails to grasp the bearing of the question at issue. From another point of view, it might seem that Scholastic principles must be a source of weakness. Have not, it will be asked, the universities, one and all, long since discarded Scholasticism? That this is true of all those universities which have submitted to secular influences, must be frankly admitted. At our ancient seats of learning, there has been a complete neglect of the great medieval philosophers, the representatives of that once famous school.

The names of Albert the Great, of St. Thomas Aquinas, of Duns Scotus are never mentioned. It is not that they are weighed and found wanting. They are ignored. It is assumed that there is nothing in them worth knowing.
The practice of what certain German writers have termed "the leap over the middle ages! (der Sprung uber das Mittelalter)", has been universal. From Plotinus to Bacon has been regarded as a blank in the history of philosophy.*

Yet by common consent the period thus ignored was one of intense philosophic activity. Metaphysical problems were discussed with an interest, a zeal, an acumen since unknown; and some of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen were nurtured in the schools of the day.

Nor was the philosophy of the Scholastics one of those immature systems, which arise when the mind of man is called to grapple for the first time with the great problems of the universe. These men had inherited the two streams of Greek and Arabian thought. They had set themselves to master and to develop the conclusions of Plato, of Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Averroes. They were influenced not by the Peripatetic school alone, but further by Stoicism, Neo-platonism, Augustinianism.

It is significant that nearly every thinker, even of those occupying a hostile position, who has devoted enough time and attention to understand the matter, has expressed his admiration for the great synthesis effected by the Scholastic philosophers.
When, therefore, the Neo-Scholastics of to-day avail themselves of the results attained in that epoch, no wise man will consider that this is likely to impair the value of their conclusions. They are but claiming their share in the great inheritance of the past.

The deliberate ignoring of so famous a period, and one so fruitful for the civilisation of Europe, may well provide matter for reflection. For continuity is the law of human progress. Advance must ever be won by building on the foundations laid by our predecessors. The nature of man, as essentially social, involves his subjection to this law.
 

The opinions of two authors neither of whom can be accused of sympathy with Scholasticism may be of interest.
Professor Huxley writes as follows:

"The Scholastic philosophy is a wonderful monument of the patience and ingenuity with which the human mind toiled to build up a logically consistent theory of the Universe. . . . And that philosophy is by no means dead and buried as many vainly suppose. On the contrary, numbers of men of no mean learning and accomplishment and sometimes of rare power and subtlety of thought, hold by it as the best theory of things which has yet been stated. And what is still more remarkable, men who speak the language of modern philosophy, nevertheless think the thoughts of the Schoolmen." Science and Culture, Lect. 2. Universities, p. 41.

Somewhat similarly von Hartmann speaks of Scholasticism as "a wonderful and close-knit system of thought, of which none can think lightly save those who have not yet overcome the bias of party. feeling nor learnt to view things from an objective standpoint." Die SeIbstzersetzung des Christenthums, p75.

It would not be difficult to multiply such testimonies from the great minds of every century. Thus Hugo Grotius writes, 'Ubi in re morali consentiunt [Scholastici] vix est ut errent.' De Jure Belli et Pacis, Proleg: I 52. cf. also Leibniz, Epist. ad Thomasium, 49, and Trois Lettres A M. de Montmort, Lettre III. On the other hand the atheist Diderot says of Scholasticism, 'Cette philosophie a été une des plus grandes plaies de l'esprit humain." OEuvres, tom. ix. p. 372. (Serious philosophers have come to expect such unsupportable contumely from minds of Diderot's sort. His breathlesly anti-Christian letters to Sophie Volland reveal a mind set naturally uncomfortable with objectivity and impartiality.

Pascal has well said, "C'est grace a là tradition que toute la suite des hommes pendant le cours de tant de siècles doit être considérée comme un même homme, qui subsiste toujours et qui apprend continuellement." ¹ The attempt to break with the past, to dispense with what former generations have accomplished, to pull down what they have laboriously built and to make a fresh beginning, has ever ended in failure. No forward step has ever been taken in that way; for so to act is to violate a fundamental law of our nature. Movements thus initiated have been retrograde, not progressive.

Yet this is what the men of the Renaissance strove to do in regard to the Christian civilisation of the middle ages. They put aside as valueless the hardly-won results of five centuries of strenuous effort, Of that great revolt against the past, the repudiation of the traditional philosophy was an integral part.
 

In the novel philosophies proposed as substitutes for Scholasticism, sometimes one of the three factors, some times another, is omitted; and thus the solution remains unsatisfactory and inadequate. Some, as e.g. Materialism, dispense both with God and the Soul. In others, as in that Neo-Hegelianism which finds the only conscious life of the Divine in the human consciousness, God is set aside, and the soul alone is kept. In others again, as in the philosophy of Berkeley, the world is eliminated; God and the soul alone remain.

The rapid rise and fall of systems is but the natural result of this. Men will not long rest satisfied with any scheme which does not account for all the facts. The pendulum of thought swings with more, or it may be with less, velocity, but as surely as it is biased by a single prejudice withholding it from any truth, it will continually change the curve it traces, and move in succession to all points of the compass.
 

They would tell you that Philosophical systems must come and go like the fashions of our dress. That we should not regard them as more than a convenient mode of representing facts. And that as men at one period interpreted the universe on a basis of Aristotelianism, so at the present age they do well to adopt the thought-forms of other systems, and interpret it in accordance with the doctrines of Kant or of Hegel.

Against the corrosive scepticism of such a view as this, Neo Scholasticism utters its protest. Philosophy is a science — the highest of the sciences.

Just as in the natural sciences, the long line of investigators gradually pushes forward the frontiers of human knowledge, and age by age increases the number of those truths which are the permanent conquests of the human mind, so it is in philosophy. Wherever a real advance has been made, that advance is true for all time.

The point has been well put by Professor de Wulf. "The endeavour," he writes, "of Neo-Scholasticism to re-establish and plant down deeply among the controversies of the twentieth century, the principles which animated the Scholasticism of the thirteenth, is in itself an admission that philosophy cannot completely change from epoch to epoch: that the truth of seven hundred years ago, is true to-day: that out and out relativism is an error: that down through all the oscillations of historical systems, there is ever to be met with a philosophia perennis — asort of atmosphere of truth pure and undiluted whose bright clear rays have lighted up the centuries even through the shadows of the darkest and gloomiest clouds. For if reason be aught but a deceptive aspiration after the absolutely inaccessible, surely whatever has been brought to light, whatever our ancestors have unearthed, and acquired in their pioneer labours, cannot have proved entirely worthless to posterity.''
 
 

It is not of course to be supposed that the Neo-Scholasticism of to-day is in all points identical with the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages. The astronomical physics of the medieval doctors were theoretically erroneous. Moreover new questions have arisen, new difficulties been suggested, new discoveries have been made. The adversaries of to-day are not the adversaries against whom the medieval doctors were called to contend. In adapting our methods to the needs of the day, we do not discard the principles of the Scholastics. But Neo-Scholasticism belongs to the twentieth century, not to the thirteenth; and it employs the weapons of a new age.

In England, for obvious reasons, the movement has been less felt, But some at least of those who have noticed it have not underrated its significance. In regard to it Professor Case writes as follows in his article on Metaphysics in the Encyclopedia Britannica: "One cannot but feel regret at seeing the Reformed Churches blown about by every wind of doctrine, and catching at straws, now from Kant, now from Hegel, and now from Lotze: or at home from Green, Caird, Martineau, Balfour and Ward in succession, without ever having considered the basis of their faith: while the Roman Catholics are making every effort to ground a Universal Church on a sane system of metaphysics. However this may be, the power of the movement is visible enough from the spread of Thomism over the civilized world."

The importance of the philosophical works of men such as Mercier, de Regnon, de Wulf, Nys, Farges, Domet de Vorges, Carra de Vaux, Mandonnet, Seeberg, Asin y Palacios, is acknowledged by all competent judges.²