Natural science enables us, it is supposed, first to know what science properly is. Other sciences—which purport to exhibit a radically divergent type—are either of doubtful authenticity and highly disputable value, or else humbug, which has long since become transparent. If now the humanists are to be compelled to practise science, they will have perforce, nolentes volentes, to take the natural sciences for their model and adopt their methods. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Under no circumstances is recognition extended to a distinctive humanistic type of science side by side with the type of natural science. The distinctions between scientific forms and methods of procedure, which are forthcoming, accordingly all turn out to constitute merely variations within natural science itself.

Those philosophers who are interested in the contemporary philosophy of all countries have come to recognize the importance of the “neo-scholastic” or “neo-thomist” movement. This current of ideas is not least strong in France, owing much at the present time to the work of Jacques Maritain. In this essay I propose to consider neo-thomist ideas in the field of art, limiting myself somewhat arbitrarily to their expression by Maritain and their application to French art throughout the period in which thomism has appeared in “modern dress,” i.e. since 1879, the date of the famous papal encyclical Æterni Patris. This limitation is arbitrary, since in the first place there are living thomists who do not agree entirely with Maritain's interpretation of St. Thomas, and in the second place scholastic principles, if true, must from their nature apply to art as such—Greek, mediaeval, and modern, to say nothing of Oriental and primitive art.

It is well known to readers of the Republic that, according to Plato's representation, a casual meeting of several friends develops into a sederunt for the express purpose of finding a solution to the question, what is justice? The question has its origin in the remark of the aged Cephalus, quoting Pindar, that whoever lives a life of justice and holiness,

Sweet hope, the nourisher of age, his heart

Delighting, with him lives; which most of all

Governs the many veering thoughts of man.

(I)The meaning of the word philosophy, “love of wisdom,” the dominant interest of Socrates, the developments of Greek philosophy in Epicureanism and Stoicism, Kant's reliance on the practical reason as a clue to reality—all justify the direction of attention in this essay from the abstract theoretical to the concrete practical aspects of thought. Not that the two can or ought to be separated from, or opposed to one another; for human personality is a unity, and theory and practice must act and react the one on the other. The familiar saying: “More harm is wrought for want of thought than even want of heart,” indicates that in moral activity under-standing of consequences is no less necessary than goodness of intention or motive. The preacher who declared that he was an Agnostic in mind, and a Christian in heart, if he really knew himself and was not deceiving himself with a rhetorical phrase, was in a perilous and unsatisfactory state of mental equilibrium.

Nietzsche's opinions on philosophy and aesthetics developed under strong and lasting impulses from classical antiquity. These were not always the same, for at various periods in his life Nietzsche placed Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aeschylus, and even Socrates and Plato on the highest summit of wisdom. In his so-called first stage of development the pre-Socratics (especially Heraclitus) were generally his favourite thinkers, and in the third and last stage these same figures tend to come into prominence again. On the other hand, in the works of Nietzsche's second, rationalistic period, when he was particularly influenced by Comte, Voltaire, and Darwin, Socrates and Plato—usually so hated and despised—are mentioned with affection, with gratitude or even with warm enthusiasm; and so, over and over again, is Epicurus.

The vitalizing effect, spoken of somewhere by Graham Wallas, which one University “subject” may have upon another if the traditional division of compartments can be broken down, has nowhere been better illustrated of late years than by the life brought into the English school at Cambridge through the teaching of Dr. I. A. Richards, who came out of the school of Mental and Moral Science. Not only his students, but contemporaries and elders as remote as myself, are grateful for the stimulus he has given; and not least grateful for the necessity imposed upon them of making clearer to their own minds the grounds upon which at various points they find themselves in disagreement with him, and the positive suggestions which they would wish to substitute for his. Their final task must be to try to make those suggestions in some language which both sides may agree to use; barring out, therefore, a good many terms which Dr. Richards regards as standing for “evident fictions”—“fictions such as universals, essences, concepts, causes.”

Ralph Cudworth, Doctor of Divinity, Master of Christ’s College at Cambridge, and philosophical chieftain of the Cambridge Platonists, published The True Intellectual System of the Universe in 1678 to disprove “the fatal necessity of all actions and events.” This disproof would destroy the various atheisms founded upon such “fatal necessity”; it would also correct those Christians who mistakenly honoured God by subjecting men to a divinely administered fate. Cudworth, with a constant eye on Hobbes, whom he did not name, struck at atheism by establishing a “true intellectual system” and by arguing away its principle of fate. His design swelled as he worked to meet the various versions of “fatal necessity” with the various atheisms founded upon them, to establish the true doctrine, and to accommodate his own copious learning, and it swelled too much for the published work to be more than a first instalment of his whole design.

There has lately been published a posthumous work on “pure realism” by an Italian philosopher who died a little while ago at an early age. He had been working on the book for some time with great concentration of energy, but did not live to finish it. In the form in which it has been edited for publication some parts of it have been developed almost to completion, while others are mere sketches and notes—though not wanting in interest, for they reveal the author's method of working, and expose doubts and difficulties in the immediate form in which they presented themselves to his mind and found the way to a solution. The most complete section is one dealing with the critique of idealism, a critique which, while it is not devoid of ingenuity, is in the main stringent and vigorous, and deserves particularly the consideration of idealists. The principal thesis is that there are two possible solutions of the problem of consciousness. It admits the possibility either that consciousness itself creates its own world, endowing it, thanks to the action of the mind on its own images, with those physical attributes that make it appear external to the subject or independent of the activity by virtue of which it is formed (idealism); or that consciousness is the immediate revelation of the world itself to itself, a revelation that can only consist in a unique act whereby the world establishes itself as identical with itself and as different from itself, as internal and external knowing and known, spirit and nature (realism). At the basis of idealism, according to Ranzoli, is the implied presupposition (of the philosophy of Empedocles) that like is conscious only of like, and at the basis of realism is the Anaxagorean presupposition that opposite is conscious of opposite.