If we had this back, and in full measure; if society were infused by it, through and through, and men lived its life, and in its life, philosophy would take care of itself and the nature of our institutions would not matter.  On the other hand, without it, no institution can be counted safe, or will prove efficacious, while no philosophy, however lofty and magisterial, can take its place, or even play its own part in the life of man or society.  I must in these lectures say much about institutions themselves, but first I shall try to indicate what seem to me the more serious errors in current philosophy, leaving until after a study of the material forms which are so largely conditioned by the philosophical attitude, the consideration of that religion, both organic and personal, which I believe can alone verify the philosophy, give the institutions life and render them reliable agencies for good.

For a working definition of philosophy, in the sense in which I use it here, I will take two sayings, one out of the thirteenth century, one from the twentieth.  “They are called wise who put things in their right order and control them well,” says St. Thomas Aquinas.  “Philosophy is the science of the totality of things,” says Cardinal Mercier, his greatest contemporary commentator, and he continues, “Philosophy is the sum-total of reality.”  Philosophy is the body of human wisdom, verified and irradiated by divine wisdom.  “The science of the totality of things”:  not the isolation of individual phenomena, or even of groups of phenomena, as is the method of the natural sciences, but the setting of all in their varied relationships and values, the antithesis of that narrowness and concentration of vision that follow intensive specialization and have issue in infinite delusions and unrealities, “Philosophy regards the sum-total of reality” and it achieves this consciousness of reality, first by establishing right relations between phenomena, and then, abandoning the explicit intellectual process, by falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind, informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as media of transmission and communication.  So men are enabled by philosophy “to put things in their right order” and by religion “to control them well,” thus becoming indeed worthy to be “called wise.”

Now, from the beginnings of conscious life, man has found himself surrounded and besieged by un-calculable phenomena.  Beaten upon by forces he could not estimate or predict or control, he has sought to solve their sphynx-like riddle, to establish some plausible relation between them, to erect a logical scheme of things.  Primitive man, as Worringer demonstrates in his “Form Problems of the Gothic,” strove to achieve something of certitude and fixity through the crude but definite lines and forms of neolithic art.  Classical man brought into play the vigour