There is a tendency to set up mathematics, in its frigid detachment and unreality, as the very pattern of a science, and even of philosophy. Here St. Thomas’s terse Aristotelianism in mathematicis non est bonum is appropriate to show the indifference of our deepest desires to such an abstraction. For they are attracted by the real which is primarily concrete; by a thing and not by a type; by what the scholastics would call the quod, in opposition to the quo.

Yet you should hear some of the people most inclined to regiment a variable and highly individual reality into the uniformity of a system speaking on the Rationalisation of Industry! ‘Ne voyons nous,’ says M. Blondel, ‘se constituer sous nos yeux deux Thomismes, l'un qui est un instrument de verité, de recherche, de haute conduite, l’autre dont plusieurs voudraient faire un procédé administratif et une sorte de caporalisme intellectuel?’

The Greeks were aware of the danger of sacrificing the real to the reason, which is almost forced on us by the nature of both, for knowledge must be general to be rational, and things must be individual to be real. Even the poets reflect this unhappy necessity of fixing the fleeting in the cold pastoral; of a Grecian urn. Small blame, then, to the scholastic who seems at times, perhaps unconsciously, to lapse into a Wolfian mood, and to confine his metaphysics to the eternal possible. The intellect is imagined to live its life in the world of essences, while the world of facts is just the haphazard outcropping of certain types; and just as number is neutral to anything from the unit upwards, so are essences with regard to fact-determinations which are, in consequence, almost destitute of intellectual value. Santanyana can be capped by the scholastic manual.