desire, purpose or authority distinct from pure practical reason itself. Scholastic ethics admits, of course, and maintains that every rational being is sui juris, that is to say, not subordinated in worth to any other rational creature, but denies that his existence does not subserve the end and purposes of his Creator. Again it admits that the obligation of the moral law is absolute in the sense that it is not contingent on our inclinations and desires, but it denies that it is out of all relation to our natural inclinations, to the primary impulses of our being, or the disinterested purposes of our existence. But Kant would have us admit more and deny less. The absoluteness which he claims for reason as a lawgiving faculty is an absoluteness which we can concede only to the infinite source and term of being, truth and goodness. Though protesting often and fervently against the inroads of self on our morality, and exacting its entire and positive exclusion from every moral motive, he bases his morality finally on the apotheosis of human personality.

But while thus exalting the noumenal self until it becomes like unto the Most High, the absoluteness that he prescribes as an essential condition of formal obligation would compel us to regard our phenomenal self or our rationally endowed sensitive nature, as poisoned in root and branch by a more than Calvinistic depravity. There is no action of ours, the spring of which is any inclination however noble, but is immoral on the principles of this magniloquent and denaturalized morality. When the Psalmist prayed, "Incline my heart unto Thy testimonies" (Ps. 118, 36), he asked for a grace, which, if granted, would have made his will heteronomous, and a life lived in accord with those testimonies devoid of moral worth; and his later acknowledgment: "I have inclined my heart for a reward to do thy justification forever" (Ps. 118, 112), proclaimed him no saint but an exceedingly heteronomous man. He subjected himself to the will of another, he did so from inclination, and worst of all, he did so for the hope of reward. Poor David, had he aimed at being an autonomous man, should have lived in accord with God's testimonies and done his justifications moved thereto by no command of God, impelled by no love of Him or His rewards, prompted by no response of his nature. to the attraction of any good distinct from himself, but solely by

respect for the principle of contradiction as applicable to the world of volitional activity, or as Kant sophistically calls it the Kingdom of Ends. Instead of the saint and sinner of Christian morality, we have the autonomous man and the heteronomous man— the autonomous man who gives laws to himself by a priori conceptions of reason which are absolutely devoid of any relation, and the heteronomous man who obeys the will of another or acts according to the impulses of his rationally endowed nature.

This is the system of ethics between which and that of St. Thomas the professor of Berlin invites the world of thought to choose, warning it that if it wishes to preserve unblemished its intellectual freedom, the sacrosanct purity of "ought," the fundamental principles of Protestantism its choice must be made in favor of Kantianism. The specific grievance against the ethics of St. Thomas is that he makes God the supreme authoritative lawgiver of the universe, and reason on which the light of the eternal ideal has been impressed only His herald. The specific fascination of Kant's system is that it emancipates man from any supreme authority, and confers the supreme power of legislation on a Deus ex machina whom he has labeled Pure Practical Reason, and who utters its hollow mandates in categorical imperatives which conveniently have no more binding force than the commands of Alice's Queen in Wonderland, and which, as Kant himself concedes, no rational being so far as we can possibly discover ever did obey. (P. 23.)

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY AS AN UNDERGRADUATE MENTAL TRAINING

REV. M. J. RYAN, PH. D., D. D., PROFESSOR OF METAPHYSICS AND OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, ST. BERNARD'S SEMINARY, ROCHESTER, N. Y.

It is the purpose of this paper to set forth the educational, not the moral, or the social value of the Scholastic philosophy, and in particular its worth as an intellectual drill for undergraduates. We are all familiar with the distinction-which Newman has ex

plained with incomparable clearness and force-between a liberal and a strictly "useful" that is professional or technical education. The liberal education is one which cultivates the intellect as a good in itself, and therefore aims at the general health and strength of all the intellectual powers; the useful or professional, or as it is now called, specialized education, is an education for some particular business in life, and therefore aims at the development of some particular power and at the imparting of some particular kind of knowledge for the sake of its utility.

Experienced people are now agreed that a good special education cannot be imparted unless it has been preceded by some measure of liberal or general cultivation of the mind; and that the later the date in a student's educational career to which the specialization can be deferred, and the longer the period devoted to the cultivation of general intellectual power, the better not only for the man himself, but for the professional or technical work which he is intended to undertake.

Now it is the general charge brought by the world against the Scholastic philosophy, and quietly assumed and boldly asserted without proof, that its study is purely professional and valuable only for a purely professional purpose, namely, the training of Catholic theologians and controversialists, that is for what such writers as Macaulay call disputes about words and splitting of hairs. My purpose to-day is simply to bring out clearly, what we all know, that the study of this philosophy is one of the most suitable and one of the necessary means of developing the general strength of the mind, and to claim for the Scholastic logic and metaphysics a place along with literature, history and mathematics in a truly liberal education.

If we ask what faculty of the mind needs especially to be cultivated in a true education, we shall all agree with Newman that it is the judgment, not meaning by that term common sense in business, but a critical faculty which saves us (to use Newman's words) from "taking the orators and publications of the day as infallible authorities; from regarding eloquent diction as a substitute for matter, and bold statements or lively descriptions as a substitute for proof; a faculty which saves us from reading history as a story-book and biography as a romance." (Newman,

University Lecture on Discipline of Mind.) This faculty when cultivated enables a man to see the point at issue in any dispute, and to stick to it; it gives the habit of holding certain principles as a standard; it enables a man to know what it is that he really holds as an opinion, and what he does not hold; to group all his acquired opinions around certain centers, and to reduce them into consistency; to reject what is contrary to his first principles, and to know why he rejects it. In one word this faculty makes the mind the master, and not the servant of the knowledge acquired, or of the assertions that are heard and the declamation that is encountered.

Now, we are speaking of the education of the average youth. "Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics." Systems of education are not made for the exceptional cases like Milton, or Locke, or Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill (critics themselves of education). Such men are above system. In the average young man what needs to be developed is judgment and reasoning power. Thus Burke says to his son: "Reading and much reading is good; but the power of diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and of applying it to every occasion that arises, is far better. The vivida vis must not be suppressed" (by a load of learning). Francis Bacon observes that "men in reading ought not habitually to believe and take for granted, any more than to contradict, but to weigh and consider."

Now, for the cultivation of such a power in the mind, I maintain that the Scholastic logic-consisting both of theory and of practice in disputation, and as habitually exercised in the study of metaphysics, is an essential part of a truly liberal education, and that there is no other branch of knowledge which can supply its place. This is a fact which can be proved from the testimony of great men who certainly had no partiality for the Scholastic system; and I for one believe that our philosophy is so well suited to be a part of a liberal education, that if it had been taught less. (proportionately) as a preparation for a particular profession and more as a part of liberal culture, less (proportionately) for the special use of the apologist and more for its own sake, it would never have lost its hold upon the intellect of civilized man.

Francis Bacon, who is often quoted as an authority in favor of a strictly useful, that is professional, or technical education, has in fact pronounced a judgment of the very opposite kind. At the very time when he was censuring the Schoolmen for their inconsistent neglect of observation and experiment and their apparent indifference about the advancement of useful knowledge, he gave the strongest testimony in favor of the Scholastic method as an instrument of intellectual drill; for he says that the shortest direction concerning the right mode of education would be "consult the schools of the Jesuits; for nothing better has been put in practice." (De Augmentis VI., iv.) Now, the education in the Jesuit colleges included a drilling in logic, and in philosophical disputations. "I find it strange," he says in another place, "among so many noble foundations of colleges in Europe that they are all dedicated to the professions, and none left free to the study of the arts and sciences universally. If, indeed, men judge that learning should be referred to use and action, they judge well [in making provision only for professional education], but it is easy in this matter to fall into the error pointed at in the ancient fable of the stomach and the members; in which the other parts of the body found fault with the stomach because it neither performed the function of movement, as the limbs do, nor of sense, as the head does; and yet, nevertheless, it is the stomach which digests and distributes the aliment to all the rest. So if any man think that philosophy and universality are idle and unprofitable studies, he does not consider that all the arts and professions are from thence supplied with sap and strength. These fundamental knowledges must be studied more deeply. For if you will have a tree bear more fruit than it used to do, it is not anything you can do to the branches, but it is the stirring of the earth and putting richer mould about the roots that must work this effect." (De Augmentis, pref.)

While Bacon asserted that inductive logic and methods of appealing to experience needed vast improvement, he certainly did not disparage the value of logic, for he said plainly that the intellect needs a special logical discipline and cannot be left to itself without drill in the methods of reasoning. (Instaurat. Magna, pref.) I for one, am of opinion that the Scholastic