We said, or intended to say, that a philosopher is known by his principles. We add that he is also known by his method. The physical method is unscientific and illogical; for it seeks through phenomena to arrive at being, and from particulars to obtain general or universal conclusions. Induction that is not based on a universal principle can never attain to anything but the particular. Generalizations of particulars are only abstractions, and abstractions, prescinded from their concretes, are nullities, as the possible, without the real to actualize it, is nothing. There is no rising from particulars to the universal unless we start with a universal principle intuitively given. It is impossible to conclude, by logical inference, substance or being from phenomena. The reality which Mr. Spencer says we are compelled to assert, though itself unknowable, as underlying the cosmic phenomena, is no deduction nor induction from these, but is given intuitively as the ideal or intelligible in the very act in which the phenomena themselves are apprehended. Mr. Spencer is wrong in asserting it, as we have said, to be unknowable, and still more so in asserting it as the subject of the cosmic phenomena, which is simply pantheism. These phenomena are not the appearances or manifestations of the Infinite Power or Being which Mr. Spencer asserts as unknowable, but of the finite and dependent substances which God, the Infinite Being, creates and upholds as second causes.
The universal is not contained in the particular, the infinite in the finite, the identical in the diverse, the immutable in the mutable, the persistent in the transitory, unity in plurality, or the actual in the possible,
and therefore cannot be concluded from it. The two categories are not obtainable, either from the other, by any possible logical inference, and therefore must be given intuitively or neither is cognizable; for, though not reciprocal, they connote, as all correlatives, each the other, since neither is knowable without the other. This is the condemnation of the physical or inductive method, when followed as a method of obtaining the first principles either of the real or of the knowable. We say only what Bacon himself said. He said and proved that the inductive method is inapplicable in philosophy, or out of the sphere of the physical sciences. The great error has been in attempting to follow it in philosophy, or the science of the sciences, where it is inapplicable, for no science can start without first principles.
We feel that some apology is due our readers for soliciting their attention to anything so absurd as Herbert Spencer’s New System of Philosophy; but they must bear in mind that Mr. Spencer is a representative man, and has only attempted to bring together and combine into a systematic whole the anti-Christian, anti-theistical, and anti-rational theories, hypotheses, and unscientific speculations which, under the name and forms of science, govern the thought
of the modern non-Catholic world. Mr. Spencer’s book, which is a laborious effort to give the philosophy or science of nothing, and ends only in a system of “symbolic conceptions,” in which nothing, according to the author, is conceived, has, after all, a certain value, as showing that there is no medium or middle ground between Catholicity and atheism, as there is none between atheism and nihilism. Mr. Spencer, we should think, is a man who has read comparatively little, and knows less of Christian theology or philosophy; he seems to us to be profoundly ignorant of his own ignorance, as well as of the knowledge other men have. He is only carrying out the system of Sir William Hamilton, Dr. Mansel, and providing a philosophy for the Darwins, the Huxleys, the Galtons, the Lubbocks, the Tyndalls, et id omne genus, and has succeeded in proving that no advance has been made by the non-Catholic world on the system of old Epicurus, which is rapidly becoming the philosophy of the whole world outside of the church, and against which the Bascoms, the Hodges, and the McCoshes, with honorable intentions and a few fragments of Catholic theology and philosophy, protest in vain. This is our apology for devoting so much space to Herbert Spencer’s inanities.
[129] First Principles of a New System of Philosophy. By Herbert Spencer. Second Edition. New York: Appleton & Co. 1871. 12mo, pp. 559.
ST. CECILIA’s DAY IN ROME.
St. Cecilia is one of the few figures among the representative throng of virgin-martyrs that strike us at once as the most familiar, the most lovable, and the most to be exalted. Every one knows the legend of her life, and the conversion of her husband and his brother, brought about by her prayers, as also by the miracles she obtained for their further confirmation in the faith. Her death, in itself a miracle, needs no retelling, neither does the history of her wondrously preserved remains, that are now laid in the shrine beneath the altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a church erected, by her own wish and behest, on the spot where her palace stood. This church is a basilica, and has its altar raised many steps above the level of the mosaic floor of the nave, and the front of the altar turned away from the people so that the celebrant at Mass stands facing the congregation, as in many other ancient Roman churches. Under the altar, on the lower level of the nave, is the shrine of the saint, and there lies her marble image, small and frail, though it is said to be life-sized, and reverently and truly copied from the sleeping body, whose form remained entire and uncorrupted, at least until the last time it was solemnly uncovered. To the right of the church is a dark side-chapel, floored with rare mosaic, once the bath-room of the young and wealthy patrician, and the consecrated spot where heathen cruelty twice endeavored to put an end to the sweet singer’s life. The actual bath is said to be within the railings that divide a narrow portion of the chapel from