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 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.