from Professor Varisco of Rome and Professor Aliotta of Padua, whose labours have been specially directed to the co-ordination in a consistent system of the principles of the sciences of fact with those of the sciences of value.  Though, after all, those who have refused to learn the lesson from the noble philosophical work of Professor James Ward, the illustrious champion of sober thought in their own University of Cambridge, are perhaps unlikely to master it in the schools of Rome or Padua.

You will readily see that I am suggesting in effect that if Philosophy is ever to execute her supreme task, she will need to take into much more serious account than it has been the fashion to do, not only the work of the exact sciences but the teachings of the great masters of life who have founded the religions of the world, and the theologies which give reasoned expression to what in the great masters is immediate intuition.  For us this means more particularly that it is high time philosophers ceased to treat the great Christian theologians as credulous persons whose convictions need not be taken seriously and the Gospel history as a fable to which the ‘enlightened’ can no longer pay any respect.  They must be prepared to reckon with the possibility that the facts recorded in the Gospel happened and that Catholic theology is, in substance, true.  If we are to be philosophers in earnest we cannot afford to have any path which may lead to the heart of life’s mystery blocked for us by placards bearing the labels ‘reactionary’, ‘unmodern,’ and their likes.  That what is most modern must be best is a superstition which it is strange to find in a really educated man—­especially after the events of the last five years.  A philosopher, at any rate, should be able to endure the charge of being ‘unmodern’ with fortitude.  It is at least a tenable thesis that many of the qualities which we Western men have been losing in our craze for industrialism and commercialistic ‘Imperialism’ are just those which are most necessary to the seeker after speculative truth.  Abelard and St. Thomas would very likely have failed as advertising agents, company promoters, or editors of sensational daily papers.  But it may well be that both of them were much better fitted than Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bottomley, or Mr. A.G.  Gardiner to tell us whether God is and what God is.  In fact, one would hardly suppose habitual and successful composition of effective ‘posters’ or alluring prospectuses to be wholly compatible with that candour and scrupulous veracity which are required of the philosopher.  As for ‘reaction’, no one but a writer in a ‘revolutionary’ journal would be fool enough to use the word as, in itself, an epithet of reproach.  Most persons who have a bowing acquaintance with Mechanics know that you cannot have an engine in which there is all action and no reaction, and most sane men can see that before you pronounce a given ‘reaction’ good or bad you need to know what it is reacting against.  If a man who wants to go east discovers that he is walking west, he is usually reactionary enough to go back on his steps.