originate a "literary school," and when acquaintance with the newest and most unsavory best seller is indispensable to one's literary up-to-dateness, it is something to find a critic who comes boldly forward to speak principles that are as old as the ages and as perennial as they are old. Small wonder that he arouses the ire of H. L. Mencken for his "effort to apply the Espionage Act to the arts" and for his "maxim that Puritanism is the official philosophy of America, and that all who dispute it are enemy aliens and should be deported." Indeed, in this our day criticism of criticism seems to threaten the sway of criticism of creative literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is, of course, almost too vast an amount of literature on criticism. Especially recommended are A History of Criticism (3 vols.), by Saintsbury; Principles and Methods of Literary Criticism, by Sears; Literary Criticism, by Gayley and Scott; Phases of Thought and Criticism, by Brother Azarias; The Principles of Criticism, by Worsfold; and A Handbook of Literary Criticism, by Sheran. As for the critics and biographers themselves, the author's work has been the difficult one of selection, and she can but beg others to remember De gustibus non est disputandum. Among the moderns the author wishes to call attention to Reviews and Critical Papers, by Lionel Johnson, and to the critical works of Christopher Morley, Augustine Birrell, George E. Woodberry, William Ernest Henley, J. Churton Collins, Frederic Harrison, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Walter Bagehot, Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, E. E. Hale (Dramatists of To-day), and H. L. Mencken.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ESSAY OF THE NATURALISTS

To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.- BRYANT

BACKGROUND

The attainment of intellectual satisfaction and ensuing rest is the most fantastic of all life's chimeras. The mind no less than the heart of man is ordained to unrest; for search after truth is the divinely imposed law of earth, and Vision of Truth is reserved for Heaven. Failing the attainment of the peace of full Vision which surpasses understanding, one could but desire annihilation. There is, indeed, no true intellectual peace in this world—unless we except the mental state of those placid parasites on intelligence, the serene bosom of whose cognitive life is never disturbed by a passing ripple of thought. The high-water mark of mental unrest is in the mind of the philosophical scientist, who necessarily must prefer "the leap of the torrent before the stillness of the swamp."

Having thus introduced the scientist, we have also raised two moot questions. The first question has to do with the relation between theology and science, an issue not to be lightly omitted in a discussion of certain

of the scientists with whom we are to concern ourselves. Now that the once hot controversy between them lies in its own ashes, now that the correct relationship has been ascertained, the diatribes of scientists against theologians and the anathemas of theologians against scientists seem rather absurd to us who, through no virtue of our own, know the truth that science can never contradict theology. Here it is interesting to turn back the pages of controversial literature to the writings of that stern old pioneer in American Catholic intellectual respectability, Orestes A. Brownson. "Though faith and science can never be in contradiction," he contends, "yet much that passes for faith may be in contradiction with science, and much that passes for science may be in contradiction with faith. This contradiction, indeed, affects neither what is really faith nor what is really science, but in minds not sufficiently instructed to draw sharply, on the one hand, the line between what is faith and what is only theological opinion, and, on the other, between what is science and what is only the opinion or conjecture of scientific men, it has the inevitable effect of creating, on the one side, a prejudice against science and, on the other, a prejudice against faith."

Now, the theologian is the first to applaud the giant strides of scientific discovery, for he knows that the reasons for his faith will be but the more abundantly demonstrated. On May 10, 1922, the present custodian of faith, His Holiness Pope Pius XI, addressing the members of the International Astronomical Union and of the International Geodetic and Geophysical

Union in audience with him, said: "The science which you profess is the most beautiful and the noblest of all that exist: it is a guide on the road to Truth, to that Truth which ought to be the object of all our desires. . . . Our admiration for the Universe, for that marvellous divine construction of which you understand the laws, its grandeur and its harmony, induces us to venerate the Creator of this wonderful edifice, and you yourselves ought to feel nearer to Him than those who are strangers to your observations and researches." Knowing that science and faith have their common source in Eternal Truth, why should one fear conflict between them? Seeming conflict appears only through distortion or misconception of fact. "Take, then," writes Brownson, "all the facts on which the naturalists support their hypotheses, they establish nothing against faith. The facts really established either favor faith or are perfectly compatible with it; and if any are alleged that seem to militate against it, they are either not proved to be facts, or their true character is not fully ascertained, and no conclusion from them can be taken as really scientific. . . . The sciences deal with facts and causes of the secondary order; and it is very certain that one may determine the quality of an acorn as food for swine without considering the first cause of the oak that bore it. The order of facts with which the sciences deal no doubt depends on the order revealed by faith; . . . but it does not lie within the province of the particular sciences as such to show this dependence or this connection, and our savants invariably blunder whenever they attempt to do it, or to rise from

the special to the general, the particular to the universal, or from the sciences to faith. . . . All that faith demands of the sciences as such is their silence, She does not demand their support, she only demands that they keep in their own order." In thus settling the obstreperous scientist, Brownson points out the true cause of the offender's revolt against faith, its so-called limitations on the freedom of science. Yet Brownson at the same time settles the Christian apologists who stress too strongly the tendency of the sciences to corroborate the doctrines of revelation. "The fact is, the sciences are not science (philosophy), and lie quite below the sphere of both science (philosophy) and faith."

As for the animosity of scientists against what they consider restriction of freedom, that is no longer blamed solely on religionists. Only the ignorant are free in intellect, having no first principles or premises from which to proceed. The only restriction which religion places for science is to forbid its leaving its own boundaries to encroach on the domain of revelation, a favorite diversion of science in Brownson's day, a diversion growing from a deep-seated need of human nature. "Yet as the sciences are insufficient, while restricted to their proper sphere, to satisfy the demand of reason for apodictic principles, for unity and universality, there is a perpetual tendency in the men devoted exclusively to their culture to draw from them conclusions which are unwarranted, illogical, and antagonistic both to philosophy and to faith. Against this tendency .. there is in natural science alone no sufficient safeguard,