trouble was that mechanical repetition of Aristotle's formulae as
matters of course inevitably led to loss of real insight into the
meaning the formulae had borne for Aristotle.
We may say, generally, that because Traditionalism is the death of sound
thinking, the ages in which the prospects of advance in Philosophy are
brightest are just those in which a powerful historical tradition has
broken down and men feel themselves compelled to go back on their steps
and raise once more the fundamental questions which their fathers had
supposed to be disposed of once for all by a formula. This has happened
twice since the downfall of the degenerate Scholasticism, Protestant and
Roman, of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the result
was the great movement in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, of which
Descartes and Galileo are the principal figures. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century, when the doctrines of Descartes had themselves been
traditionalized, the same thing happened again, the leading actors in
the drama being David Hume and Immanuel Kant; the result was first the
revival of the 'critical' problem by Kant, and then the great, if
over-hasty, attempt at a positive interpretation of the Universe which
culminated in the philosophical system of Hegel. In our own age, it is
mainly Kant and Hegel who have been traditionalized, and we seem to be
living through the last stages of the discrediting of this third
tradition with every prospect of a great advance if our own time can
only find its Descartes. In what I am going on to say I must naturally
speak of the disintegrating influences chiefly as we have seen them at
work in our own country; but I should like, before I do so, to remark
that on the Continent splendid work has been done in the requickening of
genuine philosophical thought by an influence which has, so far, not
made itself widely felt among ourselves. I mean the revival of Thomism
so earnestly promoted in the academies of the Roman Church by Pope Leo
XIII. Neo-Thomism, I am convinced, if its representatives will only
maintain it at the high level characteristic, for example, of the
Italian _Rivista Neo-Scolastica_, has a very great contribution to make
to the Philosophy of the future, and is much more deserving of the
serious attention of students in our own country than the
much-advertised 'impressionism' of Pragmatists and Bergsonians. Indeed,
I hardly know how much we may not hope from the movement if it should
please Providence to send into the world a Neo-Thomist who is also a
really qualified mathematician.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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