We are confronted by a science that boasts of monopolizing the spirit of truthfulness; as a matter of fact, we see that it uses all scientific devices to shirk the truth and to disguise its effort. In loquacious protests it rejects the “rigid dogmatism,” the “fixed views,” of the Christian faith, and it proclaims experience and reason as the sole criterions of scientific cognition; yet it always stands upon the platform of rigid presumptions, that are derived from no experience, and which no reason can prove. It clamours for research free from presumption, and, without winking an eye, substitutes its own presumption, secretly or openly. It is dishonest.
It promises to preserve for man the highest ideals and blessings for which his mind is yearning, yet it has no religion and no God. It recalls to mind the words spoken by St. Augustine of the philosophers whom he had followed in the false ways of his youth: “They said: truth, and always truth, and talked much of truth, but it was not in them.... Oh, truth, truth, how deeply my inmost spirit sighed after thee, while they filled my ears incessantly with thy bare name and with the palaver of their bulky volumes.” [pg 261] Free it wants to be, this science. One of its disciples boasted: “It has taught its disciples to look down without dizziness from the airy heights of sovereign scepticism. How easy and free one breathes up there!” Aye, it has made itself free,—from the yoke of unpalatable truth. So much more firmly is it fettered, not with the holy bonds of belief in God, but by the more burdensome mental yoke of a disbelief that weakens and blinds the eyes against the cognition of the higher truth:—and bound by the chains of public opinion, which threatens anathema to every one who fails to stop at the border of the natural. Truly free is only the science that enjoys a clear and free perception for the truth. Unfree is a science that restrains the mental eye with the blinkers of theophoby. Our age seeks for the lost happiness of the soul, it seeks longingly God and the supernatural that have been removed from its sight. But science, so often its leader, loathingly dodges God, and refuses to fold the hands and pray. As long as our age does not break with a science that refuses to know a God and a Saviour, so long will it hopelessly grope about without result, and look in vain for an escape from the wretched labyrinth of doubt.
Chapter II. The Unscientific Method.
The efforts of liberal science, to remove more and more from its scope the supernatural powers, show clearly that man may feel the truth to be a yoke, and that he may attempt to free himself from this yoke by opposing the truth and by substituting postulates for knowledge. Sceptical, autonomous subjectivism, the philosophy of liberal free thought, has changed the nature of human reasoning, and its relation to truth, and perverted it to its very opposite. No longer is the human mind the vassal of Queen Truth, as Plutarch put it, but the autocratic ruler who degrades truth to the position of a servant. Thus liberal freedom of thought becomes the principle of an unscientific method, because it loses, by false reasoning and false truth, the first condition of solid and scientific research; furthermore, by treating the highest questions with consequent levity, it betrays a lack of earnestness which again renders it unfit for scientific research in serious matters.
False Reasoning.
“The philosophical thinkers of to-day,” says an admirer of Kant, A. Sabatier, “may be divided into two classes, the pre-Kantian and those who have received their initiation and their philosophical baptism from Kant's Critic.”
The Christian philosophy of a St. Thomas, which is, as even representatives of modern philosophy are constrained to admit, “a system carried out with clear perception and great sagacity” (Paulsen), contains many a principle, the intrinsic merit of which will be fully appreciated only when contrasted with the experiments of modern philosophy. An instance is the principle of the old school, that cognition is the likeness of that [pg 263] which is cognized. Apart from the cognition by sense, we are given here the only correct principle, coinciding with the general conviction that reasoning is the mental reproduction of an objective order of existence, independent of us, even in our conception of the metaphysical world. Thinking does not create its object, but is a reproduction of it; it is not a producer, but a painter, who copies the world with his mental brush within himself, sometimes only in the indistinct outlines of indefinite conception, often, however, in the sharp lines of clear cognition.