ought also to show that there are at any rate known facts which seem to demand just this kind of explanation. Both these points, as I hold, can be established, but I do not in the least wish to suggest that any philosopher will ever find it an easy task to 'justify the ways of God to man'. As Timaeus says in Plato, 'to find the father and fashioner of the Universe is not easy', and I want rather to lay stress on the magnitude of the task than to extenuate it. But I am concerned to urge that the doctrine which accounts for what is by what ought to be is the only philosophical theory on which it ceases to be an unintelligible mystery that we should have-as I maintain we certainly have-the same kind of assurance about values that we have about facts. The chief complaint I have to make about the mental attitude of Mr. Russell and some of his friends is that, in their zeal for the unification of science, they seem inclined to assume that the larger problem of the co-ordination of Science with Life does not exist, or, at any rate, need not occupy our minds. This is what I should call mere atheistic superstition. On this point they might, I believe, learn much which it imports them to know from the works of some of the notable living philosophers of Italy, in particular 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.

In short, if we mean to be philosophical, our main concern will be that our beliefs should be true; we shall care very little whether they happen to be popular or unpopular with the intellectual 'proletarians' of the moment, and if we can get at a truth, we shall not mind having to go back a long way for it. Indeed, when one wants to get on the track of the most ultimate and important truths of all, there is usually a great positive advantage in going back a very long way for them. The questions which deal with first principles, being the simplest-though the hardest-of all, are mostly raised very simply and directly by Plato and Aristotle, who were the very first writers to raise them. In the discussions of later times, the great simple questions about principles have so often been overlaid by mainly irrelevant accretions of secondary details that it is usually very hard indeed 'to see the wood for the trees'. This is the chief reason why one who, like myself, finds it his main business in life to introduce younger men and women to the study of Philosophy must think indifference to Greek literature about the worst misfortune which could happen to our intellectual civilization.

I have tried in what I have said so far to explain what I understand by the philosophical spirit and what I regard

as the primary problems with which Philosophy has to wrestle. If what I have said is not wholly wide of the mark, it should be clear what is the deadliest enemy of the true spirit of Philosophy. It is the temper which is too indolent to think out a question for itself and consequently prefers to accept traditional ready-made answers to the problems of Science and Life. Traditionalism, wherever it is found, is the enemy, because Traditionalism is only another name for indolence. Observe that I say Traditionalism, not Tradition. Nowhere in life, and least of all in Philosophy, is the solitary likely to work to much purpose unless he has behind him that body of organized sound sense which we call Tradition. And I do not mean that true philosophers are necessarily 'heretics', or that 'orthodoxy' is less philosophical than 'heterodoxy I mean that however true an orthodox' proposition may be, it is no living truth for me unless I have made it my own, as its first discoverer did, by personal labour of the spirit. The truth is something which each generation must rediscover for itself. True traditions may be quite as injurious, if they have become mere traditions, as false ones. It was not so much because the Aristotelian doctrines were false that the unquestioning acceptance of Aristotelian formulae all but strangled human thought in the later days of Scholasticism. Some of these doctrines were false, but many of them were much truer than anything the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to put in their place, and the rediscovery of their real meaning is perhaps the chief service of the Hegelian school to Philosophy. The trouble was that mechanical repetition of Aristotle's formulae as matters of course inevitably led to loss of real insight into the meaning the formulae had borne for Aristotle.

We may say, generally, that because Traditionalism is the death of sound thinking, the ages in which the

prospects of advance in Philosophy are brightest are just those in which a powerful historical tradition has broken down and men feel themselves compelled to go back on their steps and raise once more the fundamental questions which their fathers had supposed to be disposed of once for all by a formula. This has happened twice since the downfall of the degenerate Scholasticism, Protestant and Roman, of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the result was the great movement in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, of which Descartes and Galileo are the principal figures. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the doctrines of Descartes had themselves been traditionalized, the same thing happened again, the leading actors in the drama being David Hume and Immanuel Kant; the result was first the revival of the 'critical' problem by Kant, and then the great, if over-hasty, attempt at a positive interpretation of the Universe which culminated in the philosophical system of Hegel. In our own age, it is mainly Kant and Hegel who have been traditionalized, and we seem to be living through the last stages of the discrediting of this third tradition with every prospect of a great advance if our own time can only find its Descartes. In what I am going on to say I must naturally speak of the disintegrating influences chiefly as we have seen them at work in our own country; but I should like, before I do so, to remark that on the Continent splendid work has been done in the requickening of genuine philosophical thought by an influence which has, so far, not made itself widely felt among ourselves. I mean the revival of Thomism so earnestly promoted in the academies of the Roman Church by Pope Leo XIII. Neo-Thomism, I am convinced, if its representatives will only maintain it at the high level characteristic, for example, of the Italian Rivista Neo-Scolastica, has a very great contribu