is to any system which makes Knowledge come from feeling and the mind and nowhere else.

But what about the war? Can any practical connexion between it and false philosophy be solidly established? Certainly it cannot be demonstrated. When we pass from speculation to the living, bustling, jostling world we find countless forces so tangled and matted together that scientific proof of such a connexion need not be looked for. All the influences, indeed, of all the past go to form in their varying degrees each human character and event. It is only the quack who boldly refers the special features of an age to one cause. But, granted all this, it still remains exceedingly probable that there is the closest possible relation of effect and cause between the excesses of modern statecraft and the more hidden excesses of current philosophical theory.

Of the public evils of our time the worship of the State seems to stand first. That includes a disparagement of the moral law, which is not held binding when it comes counter to State-interests. The abuse of power for advancement of trade with an eye to commercial world-supremacy is no longer screened by fair-sounding words, but shamelessly and nakedly put forward as a justifiable aim. That is, on the whole, a new thing. Men loved wealth and power long ago; but now this covetousness is hallowed by a boldly enunciated theory. Is there no main root to be found from which such a portent grows? It cannot be merely man's inherited self-love. That belongs to all the ages; but in days when men recognized that the moral law was not just a pretty sentiment, but was in itself valid and inherently sovereign, efforts were at any rate made that public policy should keep up an appearance of seeking justice and of subordinating the interests of the State to the care of the human person for whom the State existed. The result was a mixture of the noble and the base. Faults there were in plenty, but faults, such as those of Christians, are against their principles, and commonly restrained by their principles from going to all lengths. So, too, in commercial and domestic life the sound moral theory at least maintained a standard of right and went to form a powerful public opinion, and thus acted as a permanent drag when man's evil instincts broke loose. But it is not so now. The radical assumptions which underlie the action of the multitude have changed vitally; and we find instead the

doctrine of the unchecked freedom of the State to do any wrong that it chooses for the sake of furthering its own ends of power or dominion. The supreme moral imperative appealing to each one's mind and will has been more than ignored; it has been denounced like an antiquated treaty that has outlived its use. Can there be any doubt about the source of the evil?

In different ages the one constant factor is man's own nature; we must therefore seek some variable element lately introduced. Not heresy in general. Heresies there have always been, but the older ones were in the main sound on the subjectivist question. Not the mere cooling of Christian fervour; not perplexities in the face of rival religious schemes. Mere indifference will indeed give birth to infinite slackness, but its influence is negative. It makes old foundations less secure, but another cause must be sought for the laying of new ones. Again, not the convenient name of Machiavelli, which has been used to cut too many Gordian knots and has solved none. His was doubtless an age and land in which theory was vigorously at work against all moral certainty; and the driving force of that was not just in any man, but in that Renaissance theorizing which was then so grave a danger to Italian thought. Doubtless Machiavelli crystallized it conveniently, and bad rulers of a later age were quite content to adopt his conclusions. Doubtless, his maxims insinuated themselves among the interwoven threads of political motives thenceforward. But it is absurd to trace all Machiavellianism to Machiavelli. If Frederick II of Prussia was his disciple he was also much besides. For Frederick was in the very mid-flood of that philosophical school which was drifting easily along from the starting-point of Locke by way of Berkeley and Hume to its natural end in subjectivism. This is not mere conjecture. Frederick was saturated with the French ideas of his time; and it was certainly the same theories which led to State-omnipotence of one pattern in Prussia and of quite another in Jacobinical France. But as yet the fluid opinions of licentious political thinkers were only beginning to harden into theory.

With us, however, the theory is in possession definitely formulated, and not by any means in one country only-one more reason for deprecating that crude account of the present war as between democracy' and 'autocracy.' The blight of all this false theory is traceable in so-called

'free' countries as well as in those which have a strong hereditary ruler; and the cause of our present calamities is not that the seat of sovereignty has been fixed in this or that estate of the realm, but lies in the doctrine of the absolute State unfettered by the moral law and free to extend its power to whatever lengths and by whatever means. All this rests immediately on the theory of the mere relativeness of moral obligation. The fundamental ideas, it maintains-those of truth and justice first of all -do not come to us with sovereign voice from without, but are the product of our own minds and therefore have no intrinsic validity. It may be wise to treat them as if they were binding, but they are not so; and the unavoidable consequence follows. Freedom from the moral law is proclaimed to all the winds, and men hasten to take advantage of the proclamation. In short, when a theory is of universal application, when it has been framed by men of great intellectual power and adapted to practice by political leaders, when, moreover, it is one which chimes only too perfectly with all the baser desires of mankind, then if the natural results are found to follow we need not scruple to refer them mainly to this one cause. Private life has been infected by it and has produced the superman. A corrupt science of economy has applied it on the vastest scale to commerce, and corrupt politics have made an idol of the State, with the tearing up of scraps of paper and all the foul deeds of lawless war which are the fit climax to such a beginning. The evil extends far beyond the intentions of those who so unsettled the groundwork of certainty; it has weakened the sense of justice in whole peoples, and has imperilled civilization itself.

Much of this has been said many times already; but when we come to seek the true remedy it is only too evident that this wound has not been probed to the depths. To a Catholic, however, with the splendid expanse of the Church's Tradition behind him, it should be no hard matter. Nor should it be hard to anyone who, without prepossessions, will begin by observing the activities of the mind as they are. A child for the first time perceives something intellectually; his mother's face, for instance. Two things have happened here. He has felt through his senses, that is, his permanent bodily feeling has been modified. He has also made an intellectual act of affirmation. The matter of that affirmation is the feeling, and

comes wholly from the senses; but he has now added to it something quite different. He has affirmed its existence. The idea of existence in general was therefore already before him, so that as soon as the senses gave him material he could predicate existence of it. This idea was neither drawn from the bodily feeling nor found in the sentient subject. If it were, certainty would be impossible. And if we say that the idea is produced by the mind, we simply throw the difficulty one step further back, because what we want to know is where the mind got it from. The word produced' so evidently leaves the whole problem unsolved. The mind only produces as a chemist produces a compound of two elements. He produces water from two gases, but he must have those gases supplied him from without. And by no less necessity, the first idea also must come to the miod from without. That is, it is not subjective.

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The nature of the idea can be well seen by comparing it with feeling. On one side we have the material for thought in the whole sphere of sensations, a whole made up of countless single feelings, each of them brief, local, changeful, real, finite. Then, on the other side, there is the formal element of thought which distinguishes knowing from feeling. The first idea, which is the root or ground of all the other ideas (for in all these we not only feel something by the senses, exterior or interior, but also say within ourselves that the thing is so), this first idea stands before the mind in the magnificent dignity of its unique qualities, for it is eternal, infinite, changeless, ubiquitous--not as God is, but as ideas are. Certainly, then, it is not the product of the finite human mind. For how can the finite give birth to the infinite? Or how can contradictories be true at once?

Truth, then, is. It is set before the mind as the mind's object, and just by that ideal presence there the mind is a mind and is capable of knowing. If we grasp this thought rightly we see that the primary idea, in which all special ideas are implicitly enclosed, is its own evidence. It is pure light, the light in which we see all things. By it certainty is indeed certainty, and the authority of the moral law is not relative, but absolute. Once admit the subjectivist or quasi-subjectivist account, and you involve all things in perpetual darkness and hopeless conjecture; but meet it with a clear recognition of the objectivity of truth, and you straightway have the dawn. Outlines of facts grow clearer on every side of you as the day brightens.

It is surely worth while to recall attention to all this during war time, and to point to the Church herself as the protagonist against crafty forms of error which have proved so fatal. For there has certainly been a Tradition throughout the Church's course that truth is not our creature, but our master; that it is not an inexplicable secretion of the mind, but exists and has existed from eternity unchanged outside us-that is, in the mind of God, the one Being who is per se intelligible, and in whom real and ideal being are identified; and lastly, that the human mind's first act is to see this simple idea shining upon it, and that this is its first step towards all the philosophies and sciences. These truths St. Augustine used to proclaim amidst the downfall of empires. They are scattered everywhere in his works; that the mind is a partaker of immutable truth'; that the light of the mind is above the mind and excels every mind'; or again, that the light of truth and justice is everywhere present to every thinking subject.' The thinker may change, he adds; may become untruthful, unjust, but this light still abides, ubique præsto est. Can words lay more clearly the foundation of the objectivity of the truth? St. Thomas, the gatherer-up of all Christian Tradition, sometimes speaks indeed of the mind as drawing all from the senses, meaning that it draws the matter of its thoughts from them, but he is as certain as his master, St. Augustine, that the active energy of the mind 'partakes in a certain way of intellectual light coming from substances outside the mind.' Here we have the crucial point which the unsatisfactory theories now so prevalent have never grasped. They cannot, however, alter the Church's Tradition, though they may ruin human societies.

It is, indeed, wonderful how many, in these days, are eager to contribute their stone to the laying of foundations for the commonweal of the future, and what discordant counsels there are about the method to be chosen. One plan has certainly been tried and found wanting. Its rival system, the rock itself, the very truth of truth, is still waiting, that we may build upon it the new city sound and strong, compact together. We are asked to-day, in a word, whether truth is subjective or objective, and perhaps the very worst plan of all is to put off answering.

W. H. POLLARD.