ation! Were
they thus to contemplate them, they would see that, apart altogether
from any religious considerations, they are wholly impossible, even from
a purely political point of view. That such ideas are intolerable to
Catholic minds, indeed to any Christian mind, goes without saying.

Driesch (_Science and Philosophy of the Organism_, vol. ii., p. 358) has
pointed out very clearly that "the mechanical theory of life is
incompatible with morality," and that it is impossible to feel "morally"
towards other individuals if one knows that they are machines and
nothing more. Again, Professor Henslow (in _Present Day Rationalism
Critically Examined_, p. 253) very pertinently asks those who discard
all religious considerations and claim to rely for guidance on the
lessons of Nature, "If you have no taste for virtue, why be virtuous at
all, so long as you do not violate the laws of the land?"

Yet, in the face of these surely obvious facts, we find persons making
such absurd claims as that made in a recent book by Rignano, an Italian
writer (_Essays in Scientific Synthesis_, 1917). It is not often that
one meets a book so full of philosophical fallacies as this. "We are
certain of one fact," he says, "that the only organ actually brought
into play to fight immorality is the organ of the collective conscience
and not the religious organ." I suppose no more ludicrously inaccurate
remark ever was set down in print; for, to begin with, the "collective
conscience," whatever that may be, does not exist in Nature, _teste_ the
farmyard and the fowl-run; and again, whatever force is connoted by
those words must have been set agoing--by what? By Nature? Oh, most
emphatically No! Nature has no law against immorality; there is no
Categorical Imperative in Nature commanding us to be chaste or kindly or
considerate or even just. We must go elsewhere if we are to look for
teaching in the virtues. That is the fact that we must keep clearly
before our minds when endeavouring to estimate at their proper value the
nostrums of writers such as those with whose works we have been dealing.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Two addresses were delivered in 1914--one in
Melbourne, the other in Sydney. These will be referred to in
this article as M. & S.]

[Footnote 2: Sir Oliver Lodge: _Continuity_, p. 90.]

[Footnote 3: _Materials for the Study of Variation_, London,
1894.]

[Footnote 4: _Th