It can hardly be necessary at this date to summarize the contents of a book which, one notes with thankfulness, has been so widely described and discussed. It will be recalled that Mr. Eliot’s purpose in writing it was to offer a ‘contribution to a discussion which must occupy many minds for a long time to come’; and the most fitting way in which to salute his work would therefore seem to be to confine oneself to suggesting the main points at which further elucidation appears desirable. The urgency of such continued discussion should also need no stressing; the background against which these lectures are to be read is the realization, in September 1938, of a ‘general plight,’ the conscious ‘doubt of the validity of a civilization and that doubt is not assuaged but intensified, the urgent need of following as best we may the lead here given us is not diminished but increased, by the constant iteration, from press and platform, that the conflict in which we are now engaged is quite simply one between the powers of darkness and the powers of light, between Satan and Christianity.’ The last thing we should like to do would be to examine that “Christianity” which, in such contexts as this, we say we keep.’ We can make much emotional capital out of the use of labels that have lost all definite meaning; but the facts are quite plain.

It needed a choir of angels to explain to some Jewish shepherds that the Babe in yonder manger was Christ the Lord: it needed a special star to show three Gentile sages the swaddling clothes of Holy Wisdom. Without such startling messengers men might not have noticed Salvation as it lay at their feet.

It has needed a world war and the destruction, enslavement, maiming of countless millions to make men conscious of a religion which has not for one moment been kept a secret. ‘Mein Kampf’ has been translated into almost every language of the world: and the deeds and words of Hitler are its faithful confirmation. Do we now understand the ‘why’ which conjured up the Nazi djinn, the ‘why’ which gives it more than human power, the ‘why’ which gives us the key to its destruction? Do we now understand that Nazism is simply the conscious parody of Christianity?

Every one is present to God. They have been brought from non-existence to existence at the appointed time by His eternal, unchanging knowledge. They are kept in existence through every change and adventure of their lives by that same knowledge. Their very freedom is given by it; every deed and venture of our journey to God is caused by it.

God is present to every one; but not to all in the same way. He has planned creation with each as a part, but not all know it, and of those who know, some will not accept. And of those who accept, some do so grudgingly, while others intently gather themselves to God, loving Him with all their heart and with all their mind and with all their soul and with all their strength. Nor do these last forget the second commandment of the law: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

St. Bonaventure’s touchstone in philosophy was exemplarism. A philosophy is true or false according to its acceptance or refusal of the ideas. It was then natural that his preference would be given to Plato, who, because of his discovery of the reality of ideas, was in his eyes the most excellent philosopher, to whom the gift of wisdom was fittingly appropriated. Aristotle, on the contrary, a great scholar but a bad philosopher, built up a philosophy of the useless: his philosophy is irrelevant to the real, and hence worthless. Aquinas’s keystone, on the other hand, was that doctrine, so typically Aristotelian, of actuality and potentiality; accordingly, it is no matter of surprise that he should hold Aristotle in such esteem, for the latter’s metaphysics and his whole philosophy are pervaded throughout by the doctrine of actuality and potentiality, built up on this as upon two pillars.

To view a problem from the wrong angle leads inevitably to disastrous consequences and utter failure. Aquinas made his own, as a fundamental basis of all his enquiries, the Aristotelian principle, stated also by Boethius, that it is a scholar’s duty to formulate his belief about anything according to its real nature. As each science has its special subject-matter, which constitutes it as a particular science and distinguishes it from any other, so it has to be dealt with according to its proper method, strictly adhered to and used rigorously according to its special nature; consequently nothing adventitious or extraneous ought to be introduced in the process, if utter confusion and gross blunders are to be avoided.

The Christian life is a life of friendship with God, ‘I have called you friends.’ More, we are called to share the divine life itself in fellowship with Christ and as members of God’s family; ‘God is faithful, by whom you are called unto the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.’ He is our elder brother, ‘the firstborn among many brethren,’ and we receive the spirit of adoption of sons, and are joint heirs with Christ.

The fullness of the divine life is to be ours hereafter in the blessed, all-satisfying vision and love of God eternally possessed. Then ‘we shall be like to him, because we shall see him as he is-we shall see face to face, and know even as we are known. This life of eternal blessedness is indeed promised as a reward for a life well lived here below, but it will be only the full development of the divine life already begun in this world. ‘He that believeth in the son hath eternal life’; ‘we are now the sons of God.’ At Baptism the soul is born again to the higher life by adoptive sonship, and by this higher life, which we are accustomed to call sanctifying grace, we are ‘partakers of the divine nature.’

In that England which was Mary’s dowry, men were eager to offer their gift of poetry to her. The thirteenth and two succeeding centuries are gemmed with lyrics praising and compassionating her. These poems are, on the whole, naive in form; they have the terseness and singlemindedness of a short story. They are arrows winged direct from the heart. Simile is seldom used; praise is given direct. There are two or three poems like the magnificent ‘Song to the Queen of Heaven’ whose lines pulse with a passion of wonder, but, for the most part, the lyrics have the simplicity and pathos of folksong music. They are prayers in verse. The unknown authors were not thinking of fame; their hymns are wrought for their Mother’s glory:

Levedy, I thank thee
With heart so mild,
The good that thou hast done me
With thy sweet child.

Love fashions it, and dictates the language. It has the clean fragrance of a bunch of cowslips gathered in a sunlit meadow. The medieval poet has the direct and candid speech of the child; he possesses a like wisdom and sincerity. The themes of his sons are simple. He loves his Mother’s beauty; he cries to her to aid his helplessness; he pleads to be delivered from sin, and from Hell; he echoes, though less perfectly, that poignant cry of yearning which concludes the Salve Regina.

Such lines sing themselves into men’s minds, and are not easily forgotten.

The above title outlines Professor Collingwood’s project for the reinstatement of metaphysics in answer to Kant’s question, ‘How can metaphysics become scientific?’ Since metaphysics has hitherto been a mistake about metaphysics, it was time something should be done about it.

In the books called Metaphysical ( = the next after the physics = much the same kind of title as ‘Collected Works,’ vol. viii), says Professor Collingwood, Aristotle undertakes two tasks. The first is the study (First Science) of the presuppositions of the ordinary non-metaphysical sciences; the second is the construction of a science (ontology) of pure being, and therefore (natural theology) of God. As first science metaphysics is logically presupposed by all the other sciences, although from the learner’s point of view it is approached only when the other sciences have been to some degree mastered. As last science (wisdom) it will be the ultimate goal of the scientist’s pilgrimage, and the most explicit name for it will be theology.

The first chapter of Professor Collingwood’s book is a condensed paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The second separates the two tasks mentioned above and argues, in continuity with Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, that a science of ‘pure being ‘is a contradiction in terms.

The grounds of this conclusion are already visible in the paraphrase of Aristotle in his first chapter (p. g). Speaking of the system of the subordination of the sciences, he says: ‘At the base of the system of universals there are universals which are infimae species, not giving rise to any further sub-species.

‘Plainly I am an extreme revolutionary,’ says Mr. H. G. Wells in his recent booklet on the Rights of Man. An extreme revolutionary, I suppose, is a person who turns things, other people and himself right round; and there can be no doubt that things, other people and ourselves do sometimes need to Ire turned right round. Penance and Conversion: to change your mind and change your direction. But the context shows that Mr. Wells is talking politics: ‘I do not believe it possible to go on with the present way of living that prevails throughout the world, with the sovereign governments we have and the economic practices that prevail.’ Such governments and practices are in a sense ‘ways of living,’ and nobody should be childish enough to blame Mr. Wells for attending so busily to the organisation of the world, for being a revolutionary in this department of ethics alone. And in any case the department involves the whole. Mr. ‘Wells wants to change our minds at the root, and not merely our methods of government. This is implied by the sweeping completeness of his desire and vision of World-Reform; at least he thinks they are sweepingly complete, and that is the point here. Less egotistic than Hitler, Mr. A Veils is just as certain that his view is not only right but complete. But the completeness is negative, and that is the best that can be said for it. His horizontal view of the world cannot be accused of distorting the depths, for it simply disregards them. They cannot be distorted, for they are not even included.

‘Under this simple baptismal name have appeared the documents of a short life which might have been that of a Saint or of a man of genius, perhaps both.’

It was no less caustic a critic than André Therive who made the statement and wrote six columns in Le Temps to prove it.

François really needs no such tribute; the facts are self-evident. Even our national temper which view's with shrinking, if not with actual dislike, additions to the category of precocious prodigies of sanctity, or even of genius, might be vanquished by this record—in letters and rough notes—of the boy whom Auguste Valensin presents to his contemporaries.

François, to begin with, was not a child-saint. He had the ill-health which often helps towards sanctity but so gaily and carelessly borne as scarcely to appear. Obviously he had the seeds in him of a profound spirituality, but Andre Therive only uses the word holiness—‘a little strong ’ as he thinks it—in the most tentative way.

Then François is anonymous. We know scarcely anything concrete about him beyond his name, his profile in an admirable portrait-study as a boy of about twelve, and a later one; we know that his people were rich and we may guess that his home town was Lyons. This anonymity adds to the story a quality of elusiveness, and one might almost use the debased word glamour, from the lack of those data on which normal English biography is founded.

At Belshazzar’s feast ‘there came forth fingers as of a man's hand, writing . . .’ The last volume of Charles and Mary’ Beard’s enormous work is scarcely as epigrammatic as the ‘Mane, Thecel, Phares’ of the Book of Daniel; indeed, each of the three volumes contains more than eight hundred pages; but the writing on the wall can clearly be discerned in the vast accumulation of the authors’ erudition.

With patience, unending research, fine organization of material, real eloquence, detachment, culture and an occasional pleasant acerbity, the two authors have traced the cultural history of the United States from before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers until the day before yesterday. Their first volume covers the whole period from Elizabethan days until the eve of the Civil War; the second from 1860 until the Harding Administration; the third extends to the winter of 1938. Somewhat mysteriously entitled ‘America in Midpassage,’ this last volume was published in the Autumn of 1939, near the beginning of this latest war.

Mr. Wells’s latest book, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, is a pedestrian effort, and to those who revel in his peculiar vein of imaginative prophecy it must come as a distinct anti-climax. Nevertheless, it is an important book, for it is based on the distilled essence of Mr, Wells’s thought during the whole of his career; one feels that it is the final revised edition of his opinions. Here is the bare skeleton of Wellsianism, stripped of everything that its author considered superfluous. The Fate of Homo Sapiens is probably the most topical of Mr. Wells’s books. He has ceased to look for the laws that govern the course of human history and to map prodigious cities of the future. The period of analysis is over, criteria have become fixed, and he now looks out on the world of to-day fully confident that he can both diagnose and cure.

The book is primarily an essay in sociology, an attempt by Mr. Wells to sum up the present state of man in the light of his own principles. It is as such that it must be judged. Some of the reviews in the Catholic press gave the impression that it was merely an attack on the Church; this overlooks the more positive elements of the book, which will probably come to be regarded as the official handbook of Wellsian thought.

Briefly, The Fate of Homo Sapiens is an outline of Mr. Wells’s social philosophy, together with a series of sketches showing how the modem world helps or hinders (usually hinders) the dawn of greater happiness for all.

In the enigmatic future that faces us there is one thing becoming more certain with every succeeding day of the war—the old order of civilization is passing and some new order marches swiftly down upon us. But though we know now that this new order will be here soon, we cannot tell what it will be like. It may even turn out to be no order at all, but only chaos. Hitler promises a new order, and while we are confident that he will never achieve it, we must recognize that some cataclysmic change inevitably awaits us, a revolution that will turn the whole system on which we now depend upside down. Every day brings with it death to soldiers and civilians, destruction to property; every hour records the expenditure of incalculable fortunes upon the unproductive works of warfare. As all the material benefits acquired by modern industry are poured out in a vast torrent, the capitalistic and industrial order that set up those material standards is drained of its life’s blood.

The last war produced a new order of insecurity and unrest even though the actual system of capital and industry received artificial respiration and lingered on. The increasing revolt against authority and the desire for individual freedom for the lowest as well as the highest in society made the old order insecure and led to the reaction of authoritarianism. Order demands dependence and cooperation among the ordered, while antagonism and individual independence split it into fragments.