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Updated: June 23, 2025
Let any man read the Stonyhurst manuals, and say whether the radical empiricism of the Modernists could find a lodgment anywhere in such a system without disturbing the stability of the whole. Catholicism is one of the most compact structures in the world, and it rests on presuppositions which are far removed from those of Modernism.
The whole aesthetic effect is limited by ethical presuppositions; and to outrage these is to defeat the very purpose of tragedy. Specially interesting in this connection are the strictures passed on Euripides in the passage of the Frogs of Aristophanes to which allusion has already been made. Euripides is there accused of lowering the tragic art by introducing what? Women in love!
But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of Robert Elsmere, my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through Conscience, through Society, through Nature.
Descartes, died 1650. Berkeley, 1710. Leibnitz, 1710. Hume, 1748. Wolff, died 1754. Berkeley and Leibnitz, from opposite presuppositions, arrive at the same idealistic conclusion there is no real world of matter, but only spirits and ideas exist.
But if we examine the real purposes and presuppositions of the various sciences, we must recognize that the human experience can be looked on from two entirely different points of view. Only from one of the two does it present itself as psychological material and as a fit object for psychological study.
These convictions and their fundamental implications can be defined quite clearly, both singly and as a whole, and later we shall attempt so to define them. And it is of the greatest importance to religion that these presuppositions and postulates should have their legitimacy and validity vindicated.
In order for the health of the mind to be restored, the contradictory fact must be somehow reconciled with the mind's presuppositions, and the rationality of existence reaffirmed. But an indispensable preliminary to this is that we should clearly envisage and reflect upon the fact, viewing it in its larger relations, where it will lose its overwhelming significance.
In your day there were many absurd beliefs, for example the so-called 'fats' that were so vehemently avoided, are actually quite healthy, while on the other hand, protectionism and socialism are quite absurd ideas, and yet they were held dear. But today we have no such presuppositions, today we understand the world and know justice where your society knew only its shadows.
But a mental review of the intellectual presuppositions underlying the oppositions in education of labor and leisure, theory and practice, body and mind, mental states and the world, will show that they culminate in the antithesis of vocational and cultural education.
To these objections the Kantian school have never found an answer. They have simply repeated Kant's phrases about the necessary 'presuppositions' which were to be added to Hume's data. They never accepted the a priori, but relied on 'the association of ideas' to build up a mind out of isolated sensations. But was this expedient really thinkable?
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