In venturing to put in front of you, fellow members of the Aquinas Society, one aspect of the teaching of our Master, I do so diffidently; or I would do so diffidently were I not sure that you trill recognise in my attempt merely the effort of a disciple to piece together the deeper teaching of his Master and find in it something which he can use for his own philosophy in life. For this personal reason I have ventured to put together some stray ideas of St. Thomas in order to comfort myself and perhaps, therefore, assist you in the way of life.

We can now see it to have been indeed the very privilege of St. Thomas that he was never anything else than a professor: he is the great patron of teachers, for he was never anything else than a Teacher. You will remember that when on his tray to the Council of Lyons he set out north from Naples, he teas attacked by some sickness which accentuated the strangeness of that last phase of his life which so perplexed Reginald, his secretary and companion. You have only to read carefully Tocco’s text in the Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum to see many evidences of this strange condition of absent-mindedness in which he especially laboured. After the vision, or whatever it was, that took place on December 6th, the Feast of St. Nicholas, 1273, St. Thomas, to the consternation of Reginald, refused to write or dictate another word of his still unfinished Summa Theologica, and at last, still obdurate in this, moved out north of Naples when the papal summons to the General Council came. All through that journey St. Thomas’s natural absent-mindedness became a dangerous menace to him, intensified by that vision which made him fix his eyes on God. When on the road by Ticino he fell over a fallen tree and seemed stunned by his fall, Reginald hurried forward and talked hard to him so that he should forget what had happened.

From the unicellular animalcule reproducing its kind by fission in the muddy pool to the mammal suckling its little ones in the snow, the deserts and the primeval forests, there is found an incredible variety of means and ingenious inventions of living nature for the sure attainment of her universal end—namely, the propagation, provision, and multiplication of offspring. From the simple processes of conjugation in the microscopic filaments of a mould to the complex mechanisms for pollination by insects in the flowering plants one is struck by the fantastic twistings and modifications of the great mother of living beings, organic nature, to safeguard the continuance of these means.

But it is only where all relevant facts have been collected that theories can be built up and principles abstracted from what has been empirically given. Here, perhaps more than in any field, à priori theories and principles are likely to collapse in the exhaustive evaluation of the individual realities of nature.

A man may be convinced of a principle on philosophical grounds. But if he hopes for an oracular ‘confirmation’ from some aspect of twentieth century science he is usually disillusioned. Few things are more treacherous than the surface of physical nature for him who goes unwarily upon it. Principles either emerge from it more or less immediately (e.g. in our considering Quantity as such), or they do not emerge definitely at all. It is usually fruitless and always foolhardy for the student to venture further than the data of research literally allow. A weapon of apologetics welded from a thin collection of facts tends to snap in a generation, perhaps a decade, and frequently as soon as it is used. The misplaced enthusiasm calling it into existence is false and calls down the derision if not of its own age, then most surely of ages that are to come.

Nowadays there are few professional critics who praise or condemn books for moral reasons. That custom, one of the virtues of the old Edinburgh, can be seen dying in the early Victorian reviews. For years critics have smiled good-humouredly at Dryden and Dr. Johnson for their preoccupation with moral values, and writers have laughed at Milton and Sir Philip Sidney for their desire to instruct and improve. But the decline is less noticeable among those who do not have to write for money, who receive their books, not with the publishers’ compliments, but through buying or borrowing, and are as a result more inclined to read them right through. Really most of us are ignorant of æsthetic principles: we are little interested in the Will o’ the Wisp incantations of La Poésie Pure, nor do we care to try the slippery path across the Crocean bog. To the disgust of those critics who wish us to judge by their own mysterious esoteric standards, most of us insist on having a little index of our own. There are many books, said to be masterpieces, which we object to for moral reasons, and will not, whatever their artistic merits, admit to our shelves. Against this attitude, which is at least as old as Aristotle, the professional critics have often fought in vain. Most of us still insist on liking books for other than purely aesthetic reasons, and, to make more popular a writer of whom he thinks highly, the critic has to stoop to our level.

The cause of the early neglect of Shelley’s poetry was certainly moral. He lived at a time when it was more than usually easy for a rather wild young man to make himself disliked. Most people were sick to death of the ‘new’ ideas which had fired the French Revolution and sustained the Napoleonic Wars.

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.

Catholics in the Netherlands have always taken a great interest in the film problem. Very soon after the first cinemas appeared (about 1912) there arose among Catholics a movement for the erection of so-called ‘White Cinemas,’ where only those films would be shown which had been properly censored in accordance with the dictates of moral theology. This movement failed, however, owing to lack of experience and of the necessary funds. Meanwhile, at the instance of the Catholic National Purity League, there was set up a board of film-censors operating mainly at Amsterdam. This committee, however, lacked the authority of an official body, and did not sufficiently meet the just claims of the people outside the big cities.

In 1926 The ‘Cinema Act’ was passed in Parliament. Among other things it lays down the principle that, in the Netherlands, onlv those films may be shown publicly which have been passed by the National Board of Public Censors. It also empowers the Board to suppress certain films as being contrarv to good morals and public order. The Committee, moreover, reserves to itself the right to forbid the attendance at certain films by young persons under the age of 14 or 18. With the co-operation of the Catholic politicians a clause was added to the law enabling those institutes and societies which have been set up for the prevention or destruction of social and moral dangers in connection with the film industry, to exercise a further censorship on films already passed by the National Board of Film Censors. These institutes and societies may obtain an official authorization for this purpose from the Home Minister.

France, the home of political parties, lias seen the birth not of another party, but of a supra-party group—the ‘Nouvelles Equipes Françaises.’ The NEF, whose daily paper is L'Aube, stands for a united, Christian democracy, based on Christian principles of social justice, liberty and toleration: but it is well aware that such an ideal is not going to be realised without the most generous and whole-uearted work. The congress which it held in Paris last month showed its spirit: I reproduce here the most significant portions of some of the speeches.

The chairman opened the congress by saying that it met under the ‘standard of conquest: the conquest of public minion.’ Financial remedies are insufficient to restore the country. It is necessary to recreate the soul and body of France by reviving her sense of spiritual and human values and by making her into a real community.

The Marquis d'Aragon, known in Oxford and London as well as here for his competence in social problems, described his work in a small village of the South. Mere discussion meetings, he said, are useless: people must first understand what they mean by democracy and spiritual values. We do not wish, he said, to behave like electioneers, and induce people, by fair means or foul, to elect a democrat: we want them to become democratic. We must win their consciences, and save them from finding refuge in authoritarian government out of sheer disgust with the vagueness of our present democratic Government. A disciplined democracy can revise the desire for liberty and for those spiritual and moral values without which realism means abject submission to force, and idealism a fruitless and vague appeal to an unknown god.