Vedic tradition envisages the voyage of the individual after death as a passing on from one plane of being to another; and though there is the possibility of perpetuity on any given plane until the End of Time, when all Determinations are resolved, there is no conception of the possibility of a return to any past state. The later doctrine of reincarnation, in which the possibility of a return to a previous condition is conceived, seems to reflect an edifying tendency of the religious and psychological extensions, perhaps incorporating popular, non-Vedic elements.

The voyage has its end on the Farther Shore of the Sea of Life. When land is made there, the contingent Self knows itself as the Supreme Self, absolute space in the heart is known as the absolute space body of Being and Non-Being, and the Sea of Life is counter-seen by the Self as the multiplicity of its own identity. Voyaging, we are given intimations of that Paradise in Union consummating Thought, in Ecstasy consummating Will, and in the Consent of Art; knowledge, love, and work becoming Pure Act. There is in fact an ever present possibility of Immediate Enfranchisement by return to the Centre of our Being, to the Eternal Now, one and the same wherever and whenever we may be, in Heaven or on Earth. But as we are speaking in terms of Time, the possibility of severing in this way at one stroke all the knots of the heart remains only virtual. What we foresee is an Enfranchisement reached by a process of ripening and preparation; our ado is not with the Comprehensor, but the Wayfarer.

Mr. Dudley Wright’s note on Charles Lamb and St. Thomas (Blackfriars, February, 1933) opens up an attractive question which has never been treated with any fullness—namely, how many of our eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers were familiar with the works of the Angelic Doctor.

In 1814 Hallam wrote as follows:

‘Perhaps I may have imagined the scholastics to be more forgotten than they really are. Within a short time I have met with four living English writers who have read parts of Thomas Aquinas: Mr. Turner, Mr. Berington, Mr. Coleridge, and the Edinburgh Reviewer (Macaulay). Still, I cannot bring myself to think that there are four more in this country who can say the same,’

The case against the moderns is clear enough. Less than three centuries has been sufficient to allow the inductive method an uninterrupted passage through the domain of the physical sciences. And face to face with problems no longer of inanimate nature but of conscious behaviour, the modern mind (for our present purpose essentially the product of inductive procedure) continues unchecked in the impetus of conquest. Infatuated by his discoveries, the scientist incontinently postulates faith in wholly unverified theses—enchanting his disciples with the vague and the transcendental.

Psychology is substituted for metaphysic. Empirical introspection is found a more amusing pursuit than the problems of ontology. Subjective verification is the vogue. To criticise the interrogation of consciousness (to identify introspection with the arrestation of the process under examination) is to return amidst contumely to the Middle Ages. Psychology in its turn is content to take its media axiomata from physiology. There is little resentment at the annexation of mind to matter: attention is unduly urged towards the physical antecedents of what were formerly know as moral states and actions. Nor does the specialist abstain from aggressive dogmatism on matters which lie wholly outside his legitimate province. We are fairly familiar with the physician turned Father Confessor, the journalist turned theologian, the tradesman turned economist. And the hopeless diffusiveness which is mistaken for universality goes hand-in-hand with a mania for unification.