For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.—Romans I, 20.

There is a Roman road going from Cambridge towards the south-west; six miles out of Cambridge it passes between the villages of Harlton and Little Eversden, climbs a hill and drops down on the other side to the Ermine Street. A hill, a little over two hundred feet high, is usually an insignificant feature, but in Cambridgeshire, with its great expanses of open fields, things appear different; and one has only to ascend a mere few feet up the slope to command the whole of the plain towards Cambridge, with the chapels of King’s and St. John’s Colleges on the horizon. The view is of great charm; its predominant features are breadth, serenity, quietness and repose; there is just the plain of large fields, broken by the clumps of trees surrounding a few villages, with church towers rising from their midst, and the road stretching out between low hedges. There are many times when the view is not only charming but beautiful; one such time is on an autumn evening when it is growing dark, with a clear sky overhead and a white-grey mist creeping over the fields. Such an evening was Tuesday November the fourth, of last year. I remember it vividly, for I was out on the low hillside until five o’clock.

Perhaps I should not have remembered the day so exactly but for the fact that Sir James Jeans was to deliver the Rede Lecture at half-past five.

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.

When a summer visitor goes to Saint-Malo, he sees the obvious; the ancient town peering over her encircling walls, the narrow streets and tall old houses, the great church with its single soaring steeple and the arrogant castle of the Duchess Anne: very interesting if he cares for such things and likes to inquire into their history, very picturesque if he prefers to take them only at their scenic value. And in most cases he is probably content so to regard them, or to read of them in the common or garden guide-book. But for those who care to look a little deeper, Saint-Malo has other and more intimate tales to tell—tales that are sometimes based on history and sometimes have grown out of tradition, and oftenest of all belong to both. And these tales have left shadows behind them—shadows that like ghosts still linger about her shores as in her houses, and if unseen are at least unforgotten to-day. Assuredly, on both sides of her, seaward and river-ward, there are places that have every right to be remembered.

On the Sillon, the roadway that links Saint-Malo to the mainland, there stands opposite the casino, a cross of granite. I was not able to discover its precise date, but it is said to be very old; it is known locally as the ‘Stone-Cross’ and a story is told of its origin for which there seems to be little reliable authority. Be that as it may, it serves now to mark a spot on the beach above which it stands that is a place of very notable memories; there is nothing else now left to record them—and yet these memories are actual history, and not only tradition.