Those of our readers who have studied with the care their importance demands the papers on the "Problems of the Age" which have appeared in this magazine, can not have failed to perceive that the great questions now in discussion between Catholics and non-Catholics lie, for the most part, in the field of philosophy, and require for their solution a broader and profounder philosophy than any which obtains general currency outside of the church. We think, also, that no one can read and understand them without finding the elements or fundamental principles of a really Catholic philosophy, which, while it rests on scientific truth for its basis, enables us to see the innate correspondence or harmony of reason and faith, science and revelation, and nature and grace--the principles of a philosophy, too, that is no modern invention or new-fangled theory which is brought forward to meet a present emergency, but in substance the very philosophy that has always been held by the great fathers and doctors of the church, and professed in Catholic schools and seminaries. Yet there is one point which the writer necessarily touches upon and demonstrates as far as necessary to his purpose, which was theological rather than purely philosophical, that, without interfering in the least with his argument, already complete, may admit of a more special treatment and further development. We refer to the objectivity and reality of ideas. The reader acquainted with the history of philosophy in the middle ages will perceive at once that the question of the reality of ideas asserted by the writer takes up the subject-matter of the old quarrel of the nominalists, conceptualists, and realists, provoked by the Proslogium of St. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, in the eleventh century, really one of the profoundest thinkers, greatest theologians, and ingenious philosophers of any age. St. Anselm wished to render an account to himself of his faith, and to know and understand the reasons for believing in God. He did not doubt the existence of God; he indeed held that God cannot be thought not to be; he did not seek to know the arguments which prove that God is, that he might believe, but that he might the better know and understand what he already believed. {146} Thus he says: "Necque enim quero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo quia nisi credidero, non intelligam." We believe that we may understand, and we cannot understand unless we believe--a great truth which modern speculators do not recognize. They reverse the process, and seek to know that they may believe, and hold that the first step to knowledge is to doubt or to deny.