In a quite common and considered estimation, it is at once the strength and weakness of a scientific philosophy in general and of the Scholastic in particular to be considered abstract, universal, and necessary. A settled and valuable mood of the intellectual is satisfied when the mind is imagined as living its proper life in the timeless world of essences, forced only by the needs of its present state to shifting and momentary accommodations with a welter of contingent concrete individual things. But our deepest desire is to know the real, and the whole real. Now the real, if it is anything, is concrete, while for us the concrete is unique, inexpressible, and fugitive; antithetical to a scientific philosophy. Hence the feeling that the cost of a system is the sacrifice of the real.

While the structure of Thomism, as it appears in the text-books or even from a superficial reading of St. Thomas, cannot fail to strike the imagination with the vastness of its conception, the coherence of its parts, and the impregnability of its logic, there is to some a haunting air of unreality about it, which is none the less felt because well-nigh incapable of formulation in the face of such an impressive, or what I might even call crushing, perfection.