It is St. Paul who declares that “God has never left Himself without a witness” and the “witness” was explicit, however clouded, in the philosophies of paganism.  Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of man’s mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility, with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness.  Let me quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of Migne: 

“There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the true wisdom.  The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking itself great in this.  Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and boasted it would attain the highest wisdom.  And it made itself a ladder of the face of creation....  Then those things which were seen were known and there were other things which were not known; and through those which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden.  And they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining....  So God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not.  For it preached Christ crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility.  But the world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien things.”

Precisely:  and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James.  The jealously intellectual philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but “the falsehoods of their own imaginings” of which Hugh of St. Victor speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and are losing themselves in the desert they have made.

Meanwhile they have played their part in shaping the destinies of the world, and it was an ill part, if we may judge from the results that showed themselves in the events that have been recorded between the year 1800 and the present moment.  Just what this influence was in determining the nature of society, of industrial civilization and of the political organism I shall try to indicate in some of the following lectures, but apart from these concrete happenings, this influence was, I am persuaded, most disastrous in its bearing on human character.  Neither wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the inherent