Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 13.djvu/664

 SCIENCE

602

SCIENCE

of propriety, that does not protect its own industry, that gives no guarantee for personal and pubhc prop- erty and safety is on the dedine. Unhmited freedom leads to barbarism, and its nearest approach is found in the wilds of Australia.

(2) The cry of anti-Christian science is for license. The boundaries enumerated in the preceding para- graph circumscribe the logical, the physical, and the ethical realm of man. Whenever he steps outside, he falls into error, into misfortune, into licence. Now, to which realm does science belong? Aristotle's definition fixes it in the logical realm. And what be- comes of the freedom of science? Within man, the logical realm is the intellectual faculty, and without, it is the realm of truth. Yet neither is free. Man's freedom is in the will, not in the understanding. Truth is eternal and alDsolute. It follows that the cry for unbounded freedom of science has no place in the logical reahn; evidently, it is not meant for the physical ; so it must belong to the ethical realm ; it is not a cry for truth, it is a cry with a purpose. What the purpose is can be inferred from what has been said under II. It maj* be summed up in the state- ment that it is rebellion against both supernatural and natural revelation. The former position is the pri- mary but could not consistently be held without the latter. Rebellion is not too strong a word. If God pleases to reveal Himself in any way whatever, man is obliged to accept the revelation, and no arbitrary axiom will dispense him from the duty. Against nat- ural revelation Paulsen and Wundt appeal to the postulate of "closed natural causality", meaning by "closed" the exclusion of the Creator. Supernatural revelation was styled by Kant "a dogmatic con- straint", which, he saj's, may have an educational value for minors by filling them with pious fears. Wundt follows him by calling Catholicism the religion of constraint, and Paulsen praises Kant as "the re- deemer from unbearable stress". All these expres- sions rest on the supposition that in science there is no place for a Creator, no place for a Redeemer. Slany attempts have been made to put the axiom on a scientific basis; but it remains an assumed premise, an "unwavering conviction", as Harnack calls it.

(3) That the expressions "hcense" and "rebellion" are just is clear from the consequences of anti-Christian science, (aj Anti-Christian science leads to Atheism. When science repudiates the claim of Chri.st as Son of God, it necessarily repudiates the Father who sent Him, and the Holy Ghost who proceeds from both. The logical inference does not find favour with the parti.sans of that science. When in 1892 the school laws were being discussed in the German Reichstag, Chancellor Caprivi had the courage to say: "The point in question is Christianity or Atheism . . . the essential in man is his relation to God." The outcry on the "liberal" side of the House showed that the chancellor had touched a sore point. Since the repudiation of the Creator is clearly an abuse of free- dom anrl an infringement of the natural law, science has, by all means, to save appearances by .scientifically sf»unding words. First it calls the two great divisions of spirits Monism and Dualism. German scientists have even former! the "Moni.sts' Union", claiming that there is no real distinction between the world and God. When their system emphasizes the world it is Materialism; when it accentuates the Divinity it is Pantheism. Monism is only a gentler name for both. The plain word "atheism" scicms to be too offensive. English Naturalists replaced it long ago by better- sfjunding words, like Deism and Agnosticism. To- land, Tindal, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, of the eight- eenth century, took satisfaction in removing the Deity so far away from the world that he could have no influence on it. Yet "Deity" still had too reli- gious an odour and implied a gross inconsistency. To Huxley and other scientists of the nineteenth century

the well-sounding name "agnosticism" appeared more dignified. In the face of natural law, however, which binds man to know and to serve his Creator, pleading ignorance of God is as much a rebellion against Him as shutting Him out of the world.

All these and other tactful terms and phrases cover the Siime crude Atheism and stand, without ex- ception, confessedly, on a collection of arbitrar}' pos- tulates. Dualism, on the contrary-, has no need of postulates, except those dictated by common sense. Sound reason beholds in creation, as in a mirror, its Maker, and is thus able to refer natural phenomena to their ultimate cause. While science requires the knowledge of intermediate causes only, the knowledge of things by their ultimate cause raises science to its highest degree, or wisdom, as St. Thomas Aquinas calls it. This is why logical coherence and consistency are always and exclusively found in the dualistic doctrine. It is vain to hope that the abyss between the logical philosophy of Dualists and the "unwavering con- victions" of Monists may be bridged over bj' dis- cussions. This was well illustrated when Father Wasmann lectured in Berlin (1907) on the theory of Evolution and was opposed by Plate and ten other speakers. The result of the discussion was, that each, Plate and Wasmann, put his respective views in print, the one his axioms and the other his philosophy, and that, moreover, Plate denied that Wasmann was entitled to be considered a scientist on account of what he called Wasmann's Christian presuppositions.

(b) After the exclusion of God, there is need of an idol; the necessity hes in human nature. All the na- tions of old had their idols, even the IsraeUtes, when at times thej^ rebelled against the Prophets. The shape of the idols varies with progress. The savages made them of wood, the civilized pagans of silver and gold, and our own reading age makes them of philo- sophical systems. Kant did not draw the last con- sequences from his "autonomy of rea.son " ; it was done by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This Idealism de- veloped into Subjectivism in the widest sense of the word, viz., into the complete emancipation of the human mind and will from God. The idol is the hu- man Ego. The consequences are that truth and justice lose their eternal character and become rel- ative concepts; man changes with the ages, and with him his own creations; what he calls true and right in one century, may become false and wrong in another. In regard to truth we have the explicit statement of Paulsen, that "there is no j)hilosophy eternally valid ". Relative to justi(!e, Hartmann defines Kant's auton- omy in the following words: "It means neither more nor less than this, that in moral matters I am the highest tribunal without appeal." R(>ligion, which forms the principal part of justice, becomes likewise a matter of subjective inclination. Harnack calls sub- mission to the doctrine of others treason against per- sonal religion; and Nietzsche defends his idol by call- ing Christianity the immortal shame of mankind. The axiom is ])ronounced in more dignified form by Pfleiderer (1907). "In the science of history", he Bays, "the appearance on earth of a superhuman being cannot be considered". Perhaps in the most general way it is forirmlated by Paulsen (1908): "Switching off the supernatural from the natural and hi.storical world". Yet, all these subjective axioms are only more or less scientific forms of the plain Straussian postulate (183.5): "We are no longer Christians".

(c) Here we are confronted by two facts that need earnest consideration. On the one hand, the Govern- ment universities of nearly all countries in Europe and many American universities exclude all relation to God and practically favour the atheistic postulate just mentif)ned; and on the other hand, these are the very postulates summed up by Pius X under the name of "modernism". Hence the general outcry of the State universities against the Encyclical "Pascendi"