Joseph Maréchal, one of the most original and influential of Neo-Scholastic thinkers, was born at Charleroi, Belgium. He entered the Society of Jesus at the age of seventeen, and between 1895 and 1910, in spite of poor health, he not only successfully completed the long and exacting Jesuit course of studies in the humanities, philosophy, theology, and asceticism but also obtained his doctorate in the natural sciences from the University of Louvain (1905). After the completion of his Jesuit training, during the latter part of which he also taught biology to his younger confreres, he spent some time in Germany studying experimental psychology and psychotherapy. From the outset his main interest centered on the psychology of religious experience and its implications for metaphysics and the critical problem.

After the outbreak of war in 1914 he went to England with his Jesuit...