How high this wisdom rises above the limited thought of a science that imagines itself alone to be wise! Sad indeed would be the lot of mankind could it attain to certain truth in the most important questions of life only by lengthy scientific investigations. The overwhelming majority of mankind would be forever excluded from the certain knowledge that there is a God, an eternity, liberty, that there are immutable moral laws and truths, on the value of which depends the woe and weal of humanity. Behold the wisdom of the world that is put before us: “In order to arrive at a definite conclusion by our own philosophical reasoning (on the existence of God and the possibility of miracles) what a multitude of things must be presupposed!” Thus we are informed in a philosophical novel of modern times which aims at proving the incompatibility of the Catholic duty to believe with the freedom of the intellect [Katholische Studenten, by _A. Friedwald_ (nom de plume). An explanation of the ideas contained in it is given by the Academia 18, 1905-6, December and March. The ideas found in the novel are also advanced by _A. Messer_, Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie, 1909, p. 158 _seq._]. And Prof. _Rhodius_, who put the ideas of the novel in formulas, teaches: “The question whether our knowledge could penetrate beyond what we know by our experience and even our senses, is answered, as you know, in the negative by a noted philosophical school. Hence, before attacking those metaphysical questions regarding the existence of God and His relations to the world, we must first try to have definite views as to the essence of human knowledge, of its criterion, its scope, and of the degrees of its certainty. But these preliminary questions of theoretic knowledge, how difficult and perplexing they are! You probably have not the faintest idea into what a mass of individual problems the main questions must be dissected, nor what a multitude of heterogeneous views are struggling here against one another” (p. 181).