“I put this question to Brownson:  ’How can I become certain of the objective reality of the operations of my soul?’ He answered:  ’If you have not yet reached that period of mental life, you will do so before many years.’

“It is a great humiliation for me to admit that I was ever in a state in which I doubted the actual validity of the testimony of my own faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence.  I had begun my mental life in politics, and in a certain sense in religion; but to my philosophical life I was yet unborn.”

In the article on the “Workingman’s Party,” already quoted from, Father Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to lecture before the New York members of the party for several years, goes on as follows: 

“If it be asked why a man like Dr. Brownson, a born philosopher, should have thus busied himself with the solution of the most practical of problems by undertaking to abolish inequality among men, the answer is plain.  The true philosopher will not confine himself to abstract theories.  But, furthermore, Brownson at this epoch of his life had lost his grip on the philosophy that leads men to trust in a supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man who does not look to the hope of a future state of beatitude for the chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end.  If a man does not seek beatitude in God he seeks it in himself and his fellow-men—­in the highest earthly development of our better nature if he becomes a socialist of one school, and in the lusts of the animal man if he becomes a socialist of the brutal school.  The man who has any sympathy in his heart and is not guided by Catholic ethics, if he reasons at all on public affairs, will become a socialist of some school or other.  Says Dr. Brownson in The Convert, p. 101: 

“The end of man, as disclosed by my creed of 1829, is obviously an earthly end, to be attained in this life.  Man was not made for God, and destined to find his beatitude in the possession of God his Supreme Good, the Supreme Good itself.  His end was happiness—­not happiness in God, but in the possession of the good things of this world.  Our Lord had said, ’Be not anxious as to what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed; for after all these things do the heathen seek.’  I gave Him a flat denial, and said, Be anxious; labor especially for these things, first for yourselves, then for others.  Enlarging, however, my views a little, I said, Man’s end for which he is to labor is the well-being and happiness of man in this world—­is to develop man’s whole nature, and so to organize society and government as to secure all men a paradise on the earth.  This view of the end to labor for I held steadily and without wavering from 1828 till 1842, when I began to find myself tending unconsciously towards the Catholic Church.’