Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/74

 logic, metaphysics, and natural ethics. First is given a short treatise on dialectics, which differs little from the ordinary logic of Jevons or Whateley, and it is followed by a more careful study of the second or material part of logic. Just as the pressure of unbelief evolved the distinct science of philosophy, so the pressure of modern criticism, of Kantism and Empiricism, has lent a vast importance to material logic or ‘Criteriology’ as an introduction to scholastic metaphysics. The transcendentalist and the Empiricist, coming from opposite quarters, have joined forces in the destruction of pure metaphysics. The criteriology of the modern scholastic attempts to ward off their criticism by a vindication of the trustworthiness of our faculties and by the establishment of an available criterion of truth.

A treatise of general metaphysics follows in which are discussed, analysed, and vindicated the general concepts and principles which will be used subsequently in the construction of the desired theses; such are, causality, substance and accidents, time and eternity, finiteness and infinity, &c. Special metaphysics is divided into three parts, cosmology, psychology, and natural theology or theodicy. The division frequently changes, but the treatise is understood to discuss every object which comes within the purview of unaided human thought. It opens with a proof of the existence of the material world, against the Idealists, discusses its origin and its features of time and space;