It is plain that we have here a one-sided emphasis on the dynamic aspect of reality no less fatal to sound philosophy than the exclusively static view which has been falsely attributed to the Greeks.  A little clear thinking ought to be enough to convince anyone that the two aspects of reality which the Greeks called sthasist and khinesist are correlative and necessary to each other.  A God who is merely the principle of movement and change is an absurdity.  Time is always hurling its own products into nothingness.  Unless there is a being who can say, ’I am the Lord, I change not,’ the ‘sons of Jacob’ cannot flatter themselves that they are ’not consumed.’[77] But Laberthonniere and his friends are not much concerned with the ultimate problems of metaphysics; what they desire is to shake themselves free from ‘brute facts’ in the past, to be at liberty to deny them as facts, while retaining them as representative ideas of faith.  If reality is defined to consist only in life and action, it is a meaningless abstraction to snip off a moment in the process, and ask, ‘Did it ever really take place?’ This awkward question may therefore be ignored as meaningless and irrelevant, except from the ‘abstract’ standpoint of physical science.

The crusade against ‘intellectualism’ serves the same end.  M. Le Roy and the other Christian pragmatists have returned to the Nominalism of Duns Scotus.  The following words of Frassen, one of Scotus’ disciples, might serve as a motto for the whole school: 

’Theologia nostra non est scientia.  Nullatenus speculativa est, sed simpliciter practica.  Theologiae obiectum non est speculabile, sed operabile.  Quidquid in Deo est practicum est respectu nostri.’

M. Le Roy also seems to know only these two categories.  Whatever is not ’practical’—­having an immediate and obvious bearing on conduct—­is stigmatised as ‘theoretical’ or ‘speculative.’  But the whole field of scientific study lies outside this classification, which pretends to be exhaustive.  Science has no ‘practical’ aim, in the narrow sense of that which may serve as a guide to moral action; nor does it deal with ‘theoretical’ or ‘speculative’ ideas, except provisionally, until they can be verified.  The aim of science is to determine the laws which prevail in the physical universe; and its motive is that purely disinterested curiosity which is such an embarrassing phenomenon to pragmatists.  And since the faith which lies behind natural science is at least as strong as any other faith now active in the world, it is useless to frame categories in such a way as to exclude the question, ’Did this or that occurrence, which is presented as an event in the physical order, actually happen, or not?’ The question has a very definite meaning for the man of science, as it has for the man in the street.  To call it ‘theoretical’ is ridiculous.