of life was so much less complicated. There was little danger of error here; but with each forward step of reflection the risks of self-deception grow alarmingly. Sometimes it is honest dullness, sometimes blinding warping passion, that perverts the theories in the making, and renders them, not clearer views of the first known truths, but laboured excuses for a denial of them. Thus false first principles are forged; and just because they are not clear dry truth, but apologies for popular error, they are welcomed, and quickly begin to run through society, to create false consciences everywhere, and overwhelm simple truth under a mountain of special pleading. An historical instance will make the bearings of this clearer.

The volcanic outburst of the French Revolution had been prepared, like all other eruptions, by slow accumulations underground. But no one can think that the sufferings of the poor and either the high-handedness or the embarrassments of the Government would have brought about such an overthrow by themselves, if it had not been for new systems of thought which had been imperceptibly but most radically affecting the minds of many. One must have recourse to some widespread change of first principles to explain why abuses, which in many ages are either tolerated or peacefully reformed, are in another suddenly swept away, or rather exchanged for others, by a wild outbreak of violence and blood. It is, therefore, only at first sight that it will seem extravagant to trace the Revolution to the sensistic theories of the school of Locke. Locke, in England in the seventeenth century, writing with philosophic calmness, lays it down that all ideas are drawn from sensation alone. First we feel, and then we reflect on our feeling. The general truths that we come to recognize are simply drawn from the sensations. How the sensations, which are particulars, can contain in themselves universal truths he does not and cannot explain; but he says we can get the truths from nowhere else. theory was soon popularized in France. In Britain Hume drew the reasonable inference that universals extracted from things that cannot contain them have no validity. In other words sensism naturally produces universal scepticism. The British public did not mind all this, but again it gained greedy hearers in France; and we know how profoundly it was leavening the public mind and obscuring the value of truth and the dignity of man and

The

the authority of the moral law when the political excitements of 1789 gave it its popularity.

When such a philosophy is translated into practical activity it undergoes a startling change of appearance. A bookish thinker first put it together, tentatively, coldly; and his temperament left him unconcerned with the possible effect of his theories on masses of men. To him the theoretical was keenly interesting; but the practical was a quite different world in which he went through certain dull routines with much indifference. He never thought of combining the two. He probably knew that the theories could not really bear that test in actual conditions. But to the multitude on whom they gradually dawned and to whom they came as decrees of emancipation they spoke very differently. The crowd were more logical than the philosophers in this case, and they followed their theory out remorselessly to the full length of its implications. It was an easy step from Locke's impossible creature of sense and reflection, and from Hume's walking contradiction who doubted everything, to political theories like Rousseau's, which invest the State with omnipotence and minorities with no rights at all, and to that doctrine of equality which more than any other seems naturally to lead to general servitude.

Sensism is, of course, not a philosophy in any complete sense, for it has no first principle. Its principle is not a first, but involves a deeper question, which is never answered. One could draw from it a great number of fine sentiments-they are just the crop such a soil would favour -a pleasant sense of comradeship or brotherhood, for instance; whence sprang, in its time, the spirit which marks the governments of the nineteenth century, all coloured more or less with the effects of that great upheaval. Man's material well-being was sought by many of them with praiseworthy vigour, but his noblest interests were too often either derided and starved or left unheeded as matters so unimportant and doubtful that an enlightened State could not cumber itself with providing for them. And thus it is that false philosophies tend to undermine themselves.

We see, then, that the influence of speculative thought upon the world's doings is no new thing. It has turned the whole stream of life from one channel to another in the past, and it may do so again. Surely, it is turning it now.

Surely that monstrous growth of evils in which our age is so luxuriant has also its basis in false systems of philosophy which have taken a step from the sensism of the eighteenth century to the no less deadly subjectivism of the nineteenth. The systems of this period have been many and often contradictory of each other, but on the whole they have had a prevalent spirit; and that spirit has been the very motive-power which is hurrying onwards the disintegration of civilized society. Again, it is undermining itself; and Nature's own homeopathic treatment is making of the appalling evils of the day the very remedy, the violent and desperate dose, which alone can save us. We cannot pretend here to analyse any single scheme in illustration of our thesis; but a brief glance at subjectivist philosophy in general may help in the detection of its subtle poison.

Subjects and objects are nowadays spoken of so vaguely, even by people who pass for philosophers, that one wishes it were possible to withdraw the two words altogether from popular speech. In this paper at any rate the subject is the soul itself, intelligent and sentient, acting or acted upon; the object is that which is wholly external to the subject, but stands before him and is immediately apprehended by him. By a subjectivist philosophy we mean, therefore, one in which even that which seems wholly external to the subject is attributed to that subject. It is difficult to describe this standpoint without seeming to travesty it. Its lure, however, has been dreadfully powerful in all ages, doubtless through the egotism which debilitates man's nature. Nothing else could recommend so irrational a doctrine.

Some_philosophers have been unconsciously subjectivist. The sense, they explained, perceived external things in their particularity; the understanding perceived their common element only. Each in its own way was a power of feeling, for the intelligence had a sort of sense of this common element-that is, of the primary ideas. But ideas have no life of their own; they only exist as seen by the mind. Where, then, does it get them from? They are abstracted, say these theorists, from the sensations. But they are not in the sensations. The particular, the feeling, is quite unable to contain in itself the common, which is a relation of the feeling with something of quite a different nature. Is the common element, then, in the

mind itself? No, they say, there are no ideas innate in the mind; they are drawn from the senses only. As water takes the shape of the vessel it is poured into, so the understanding (they assure us) imparts its own form, that of universality, to the thing perceived by it. The reader may here be left to judge whether this explanation is or is not subjectivist, or whether it deserves to be called a philosophical theory at all. It gives us no final sanction of truth whatever. It leaves us with no answer to the universal scepticism of Hume or to the undisguised subjectivism of those who trace all knowledge to the human subject alone. In short, it is either false, if it is taken in a subjectivist sense, or it is no philosophy if taken otherwise; for in this case it leaves the whole mystery unexplained-whereas the philosopher had undertaken to give us the ultimate reason which furnished a reason for all other things and had its own reason evident to all men in itself.

Perhaps it is to the theory here touched on that many later and more openly subjectivist systems owe their origin. However that be, the enemy has certainly come in like a flood in the last hundred years. His methods of attack are many, but in general he has turned his back on sensism. He recognizes the existence of a priori knowledge. Given the sensations, he says, there is something in the nature of the soul by which we know the existence of bodies having those sensible qualities. There is an energy within us which compels us to assert this; but by what right we do so, or whether there is truly such a universe as we assert, we cannot know. Or perhaps we maintain that we do know, but only relatively: we know as others do. It is not true knowledge; it is only that we declare it to be knowledge, but can never know that there is anything external to us corresponding with that assertion. Or, worse still, there is no absolute truth. We produce the universe from ourselves as a spider does its web, and thus surround ourselves perforce with a profound and hopeless illusion. For it practically comes to that. A soul that can produce its own ideas, that can take its mere sensations and by its own magical properties convert them into something wholly different and call the result Knowledge, must be said to produce the universe. But if it be maintained that a limited, particular, real subject can ' produce' something unlimited and universal and ideal,

what has been explained? Nothing: obscurum per obscurius, and therefore nothing. Either the soul must use something of itself to effect this singular production, or it must receive it from without. But by the very terms of this theory the cognition is not something of the soul, but is produced by it. The problem is therefore still unsolved. Such a system, once formulated, was obviously at once in an unstable position, and began to move of its own accord. At first things in themselves were merely held to be unknowable by us. But the drift soon passed beyond that, and it was laid down that nothing, not even God, can subsist at all save from the human subject. The next steps were into more than one variety of pantheism. But, one and all, these systems of thought are unphilosophical, because they do not rest on a self-evident basis, but on an insoluble puzzle which really denies the validity of all knowledge. The very suicide of philosophy this, as well as the murder of much besides!

It was, in fact, inevitable that such systems, so ably argued, so loudly proclaimed, should influence the world very widely. Cardinal Newman, even in his early days, was already raising a warning cry against what he termed liberalism in religion, and it is patent how the same evil has done infinite mischief since then, profoundly affecting the multitude, but also beating against the adamantine barriers of Catholic theology and working its way in at unguarded points to confuse the faith of certain souls. Modernism was, of course, the offspring of subjectivism. It made an unhallowed union of Catholic thought and eternal and necessary doubt. It scarcely was a system, but in all its vagaries there was one constant mark. Truth, it said, was not set before the mind from without, but welled up like a spring within the subject, so that our own feelings were the final criterion of certainty. That certainty was but phenomenal or relative. Truth could not be really known, but it was wise to act as if we knew it. We were to distinguish 'truth in itself,' which was quite beyond our ken, from 'truth as seen by us,' which for the world's purposes was just as good as truth. Meanwhile, all the fair organization of Catholic dogma seemed to be left standing and flourishing undiminished, like a great fruit tree that has not yet fallen but has its roots secretly hacked through. Nothing, in short, can illustrate more clearly than Modernism how precisely contrary Christianity