We hear much of the ideal of European unity, and much more of the difficulties lying in the Way of its realisation. But for a satisfactory definition of this unity we ask in vain. The trend of public and private comment is largely negative—let us avoid war at all costs. It may be of some use to consider the problem from a strictly Thomist standpoint and to discover whether it can be solved in the light of Thomist principles.

All conflict is ultimately metaphysical and every war a battle of philosophies. Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes, by teaching that reality is reducible mathematically, have made the unity of number identical with that of being. Unfortunate man not so reducible, has become ‘res cogitans’ cut off from reality, thinking intuitively, and the body, as Maritain observes, an instrument not of perception, but of conquest. Intellect is shut up in the brain, and body goes forth to organise matter and subdue the Universe. This situation is further complicated, on the one hand, by Kant’s doctrines of unknowable reality and the supremacy of the moral consciousness, and, on the other, by Hobbesian and nineteenth century evolutionary materialism. Small wonder the heirs of such thought find themselves clamouring for a European unity they cannot define but for which they are ever more or less consciously striving.