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CATHOLIC REALISM] Such is the modern “Acatalepsia,” which arises from denying the evidence of the senses, and from citing the transfigured realism of Spencer instead of the original realism of Aristotle, about whom Balfour speaks as follows: “It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to sum up our debts to Aristotle. But assuredly they do not include a tenable theory of the universe.”

4. The Past and Future of Metaphysics.—Aristotelian realism is the strong point of Roman Catholic philosophy. As interpreted by Thomas Aquinas, it is now in danger of becoming a dogma. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII. addressed to the bishops the Encyclica aeterni patris, which contained the words, “Sancti Thomae sapientiam restituatis et quam latissime propagetis.” From the Roman Catholic point of view this reaction to “Thomism” was a timely protest against modern metaphysics. It was founded upon a feeling of uneasiness at a growing tendency among Roman Catholic writers not only to treat theology freely, but to corrupt it by paradoxes. 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, and in England from the difference between the freer treatment of metaphysics by some Roman Catholic writers and that which has arisen under the immediate influence of Thomism. J. H. Newman (1801–1890), maintaining the authority of conscience and the probabilism of the understanding, concluded to the necessity of a higher authority in the primitive church. W. G. Ward was a philosophical critic of Mill. St George Mivart, in The Ground-work of Science (1898), maintained the reality of an active causative power underlying Nature, and the dignity of human reason, from an independent point of view. On the other hand, more under the influence of the Thomist reaction, Thomas Harper published The Metaphysics of the School (1879, &c.), describing scholasticism, as it appears in the works of Aquinas; and The Manuals of Catholic Philosophy, edited by R. F. Clarke, include General Metaphysics (1890), by John Rickaby, who effectively criticizes Hegel by precise distinctions, which, though scholastic, did not deserve to be forgotten.

Centuries elapsed after Aquinas before Galileo and his successors reformed natural science, and before Bacon destroyed the metaphysical dualism of matter and form by showing that a form in Nature is only a law of the action of matter, and that, as the action of a body is as individual as the body, the form is eternal only in thought (ratione). The psychology of Aristotle and Aquinas thus became impossible; for, if the form of a body is only a mode of matter, to call one’s soul the form of one’s body is to reduce it to only a mode of matter, and fall into materialism. Hence Descartes began the reform of psychology not only by the appeal to consciousness, “I think,” but also by opposing body and soul, no longer as matter and form, but as different substances. These great improvements, due to the genius of Galileo, of Bacon, of Descartes, are the fresh beginnings of modern thought, from which we dare not turn back without falling into obscurantism. What, then, is the future of metaphysics? We must return not to the authority but to the study of Aristotle. The independence of metaphysics as the science of being, the principles of contradiction and excluded middle with their qualifications, the distinction without separation between substance and attributes, the definition of substance as a distinct individual thing, the discovery that the world consists of substances existing apart but related to one another, the distinction between material and efficient causes or matter and force, the recognition both of the natural and of the supernatural—all these and many other half-forgotten truths are the reasons why we must always begin with the study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. But their incompleteness shows that we must go forward from Aristotle to Bacon and modern science, and even pass through the anarchy of modern metaphysics, in the hope that in the future we may discover as complete an answer as possible to these two questions:—


 * 1) What is the world of things we know?
 * 2) How do we know it?