ation, Calvinism
played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of
mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the
nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we
have become through this dominance, coupled with the general
devitalizing or abandonment of religion.

And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy
engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans,
with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is
visible a tendency to get away from the old Pagan static system reborn
with the Renaissance. We can never forget that Bergson has avowed that
"the mind of man, by its very nature, is incapable of apprehending
reality." After this the return towards the scholastic philosophy of the
Middle Ages is not so difficult, nor even its recovery. If we associate
with this process on the part of formal philosophy the very evident, if
sometimes abnormal and exaggerated, progress towards a new mysticism, we
are far from finding ourselves abandoned to despair as to the whole
future of philosophy.

Now this return and this recovery are, I believe, necessary as one of
the first steps towards establishing a sound basis for the building up
of a new and a better civilization, and one that is in fact as well as
in name a Christian civilization. I do not mean that, with this
restoration of Christian philosophy, there we should rest. Both
revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our
broken life were restored, philosophical development would be
continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they
proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy. I think a break of
continuity was effected in the sixteenth century, with disastrous
effects, and until this break is healed we are cut off from what is in a
sense the Apostolical succession of philosophical verity.

Before going further I would guard against two possible misconceptions;
of one of them I have already spoken, that is, the error so frequent in
the past as well as today, that would make of philosophy, however sound,
however consonant with the finalities of revealed religion, a substitute
in any degree for religion itself. Philosophy is the reaction of the
intellect, of man to the stimuli of life, but religion _is_ life and is
therefore in many ways a flat contradiction of the concepts of the
intellect, which is