truths and facts, our mentality is, no doubt, limited, because the mind of every one has certain boundaries to its insight, and is subject to the limitations of those antecedent acquirements with which new ideas should come into association. Hence, given this limited insight into new things, or limited experience of old things, there are some perceptions which the mind appreciates, grasps, grips, tastes, relishes; others, not so. One sort fits in and comes natural; the other does not; though they both agree, as the less with the more.

Four agrees with six, as contained in it, though not equal to it. They are not false or contradictory, one to another, because they happen not to be in the same numerical degree. And, if you and I meet a person in whom you see only some man, but I, my friend Pierre, there is no contradiction between. the contents of your obscure apprehension and those of my distinct comprehension. In substance, the fact before us is identical for both of us.

Yet these varying degrees of distinctness have given occasion for persons to talk of a "real assent,' and of an unreal one; of some truths being accepted merely "because the Church says so"; others, not only because the Church says so, but because we get a mental hold or live appreciation of them; as the good woman said, to whom a great truth was brought home, that she had now something to "chew on."

This difference of apprehension, which is purely an accidental circumstance of degree and not of kind, of personal relish and not of objective truth, is now being abused by Modernists, as a reason for demanding a new terminology to express old truths; their obvious intent being to discard old truths altogether under the pretext of dressing them up

anew to suit the twentieth century's thought."

"modern

BENJAMIN. With or without a live realization in the apprehension, the circumstance that "the Church says so" is always a full warrant for faith.

ST. VICTOR. Yes; as it is the full warrant for all human belief in society that witnesses say so, and tell you, for instance, of a place called Pekin or Calcutta-whether those names still remain for you as mere marks upon the map, or are caught up by the mind in a live association of previous experience and information. In this connection, as showing the difference between a live perception and an abstract conception, the passage of Job is quoted: "With the hearing of the ear I have heard of Thee; but now my eye seeth Thee." 1

And so it comes to pass that things tangible, palpable, sensible, which mice and frogs can see as well as ourselves, are greeted by so many people with the "real assent," which you have cited; while things spiritual, eternal and divine, which are the native atmosphere of an intellect, seem far away in the hazy distance-seem unreal, ideal, misty, even though tinged with gold by the sun, or with silver by the moon. To the vacant mind or, shall I say, to the stomach of Materialism a mess of pottage is much more "real" in that sense than a birthright; the Materialist will sell this for that any day, as Esau did, and will boast of it. Such mentality is well illustrated by St. Bernardine's simile of the dog with his bone; says the Saint, you may offer the dog to make him king or Pope; but he will still prefer his bone! See the difference of valuation in appreciating a broken limb or a broken soul. To a broken limb the attitude of the mind is most emphatic and 1 Job 42. 5.

'real"; and you will never hear the end of it from the patient. To a soul and its career broken by a mortal sin, with the eternal loss of God, many a person pays not the slightest heed, and does not catch any meaning in the obvious truth which made a saint of Francis Xavier: "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul!" 1 Still less does such a one rise with any vividness of assent to the height of that religious sentiment: “My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God." 2

CHAPTER XII

PRAGMATISM

BENJAMIN. Well, you seem to lay emphasis enough on facts, and on assenting to them. But we cannot help doing so if we have our wits about us.

ST. VICTOR. That point about facts is directed against a morbid mentality, which affects to fabricate things, as Idealists do. Or, if it does not fabricate its facts and project them, it affects to withhold all rational assent from things actual and real, as Sceptics do, who know no truth outside by its evidence nor admit any certainty inside.

BENJAMIN. There remains then the school of hard and dry facts. But we have always understood that to be no very amiable school, nor very rational, nor intellectual, nor graced with the slightest touch of the ideal.

ST. VICTOR. You refer to the hard, gritty frame of mind, which rasps out facts alone, and will not cast a glance at causes, ideals, rules, reasons. Listen. to this American: "Dedicate your life," says he, 'to men and women, to personal relationships. You will find that the causes take care of themselves." Now the dedication of your life to a right object would be right enough, as all religious of the Catholic Church exemplify in their lives of devotion. But to be shiftless and ignorant about the reasons why, and the objects wherefore, is what no workman would tolerate in the commonest apprentice. So here you have Pragmatism, which looks only to results. Whether things are governed by luck or law, by

chances or causes, does not concern the Pragmatist at all. Yet, as was said of old, it is a fool who trusts to luck; a wise man, to cause and effect.

BENJAMIN. When people speak of results, do they not imply the operation of causes? as you remark the American said: Causes will take care of themselves.

ST. VICTOR. There's the fun of the thing to admit there are causes, and say, mind only their effects! Let these come about anyhow. You need not know; you need not care; just take things at random. You may be simply wrong or perverse, looking for figs on briars, or grapes on thistles; all you profess to be doing is looking for the good things, for grapes and figs and any other plunder of results. They "grow" somehow and somewhere! Pass the spoils round, wherever they come from! Whence? Oh! that does not concern the pragmatical frame of mind, at least in matters of religion. But what does concern it is just what comes home to the baby or the child-the grown fig, the grown grapes, the grown peach.-Don't you see that this shutting the eyes to the process of cause and effect is not only a denial of all philosophy, but an offence to plain common sense. In common life, when we praise or blame a child we are only establishing the relation between an effect and its cause. We say: You have done well, meaning that this good effect comes from you as its cause. We say: You have done ill, signifying that this bad effect is referred to you as responsible. BENJAMIN. But does it appear that the pragmatical mind eschews causes altogether?

ST. VICTOR. By way of an afterthought, it will hitch results to causes, which often enough don't belong to them. Or it will attach results as immediate effects to causes which are very remote. For