Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/22

 S. Thomas vainly strives to reconcile these conflicting principles in a higher synthesis, defining clearly the limits of faith and reason. The antithesis of feeling lives on, although in a more moderate form, in the “lumen superius,” the “excessus mentalis et mysticus” of S. Bonaventura who counsels his followers to appeal for penetration into the highest truth: to “gratiam, non doctrinam”; “desiderium, non intellectum”; “caliginem, non claritatem”; indeed, another antithesis is added in the voluntarism of Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus, which places “Voluntas imperans intellectui est causa superior respectu actus eius” in opposition to the “Simpliciter tamen intellectus est nobilior quam voluntas” of S. Thomas. The exaggerated subtleties of the scholastics and the interminable controversies between the followers of S. Thomas and those of Scotus lead by way of Ockham’s scepticism to a re-awakening of the spirit of mysticism in Eckhart and Gerson. The epic struggle still continues in modern philosophy; the first triumphs of mathematical natural science encouraged the boldness of Cartesianrationalism, against which the tormenting doubt of the mystic Pascal struggles in vain. Intellectualism, not content with its theoretical domain, would fain in the teaching of Spinoza invade that of moral life as well, vainly deceiving itself into the belief that it can interpret the action of the passions more geometrico, and reaches its extreme in the claim of Wollaston to be able to express the supreme laws of duty as logical relations, a claim calling forth the just reaction of the sentimentalists from Shaftesbury to Smith. The mind of man is once more irresistibly drawn in the opposite direction by the piercing analyses of Berkeley and Hume and the critical genius of Kant, which is at one and the same time the apotheosis of the physico-mathematical method in the order of phenomena and the irrevocable condemnation thereof as an organ of speculation. We see the antithesis once more in the traditional form of feeling regarded as the direct revela-