Since we are to try to lay a foundation for future discussion, the first essential seems to be that we shall know our own mind. And as catholics that means in the words of St. Paul: ‘to let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus’ (Phil, ii, 5). When we begin to appreciate what that means we can take our stance.

The world for us is explained in terms of reason and of faith-—two ways of knowing the truth, different in mode and complementary in what they give the mind. In common with every human being we can use our mind on the world as we discover it, and we do. Asking the how and why of things, sorting out the wealth of experience and facts and activity, trying tc discover some purpose in it all, to get a view of things as a whole and in their causes, and this is to philosophise. Sapientis est ordinare. Men have done this from the beginning with more or less sincerity, more or less success. Sometimes philosophers have succumbed to the temptation to pursue one aspect at the cost of the whole, sometimes philosophy has been prostituted by being made the handmaid of propaganda. So that at first glance the history of philosophy seems to present an overwhelming confusion of theories that contradict, an embarras de richesses. But a closer inspection does yield a developing body of thought, as indeed we can rightly expect, since the raw material of philosophy is God’s revelation of Himself in nature. This body of thought, the philosophia perennis, synthetised by Aristotle among the pagans, and Aquinas among the Christians— that is not to exclude others, but to name the morning stars—and enriched, sometimes unwittingly, by their successors, will provide us with principles when we begin to sort out the richness of knowledge and achievement, the bewilderment of chaos and confusion we find ourselves in to-day.