philologist, critic, or litterateur, worthy of the name, can be mentioned, who did not end by applying his conclusions to Theology. Were Kelvin, or Darwin, or Huxley, or Spencer, or Taine, or Littré, or Renan, or Harnack, or Mommsen,—not to go through the whole list-were they all made slaves because they could not help becoming theologians? True, they were not content to supply the materials to others better trained than they in this special department. But even so, in avoiding that personal indignity-if so they deemed it-they could not save their respective sciences from ministering to theology as represented by themselves.

If there has been a tendency among students of other branches of science to resent the claim made by Theology to press into her service the results they have achieved, there has been, I fear, only too often, a reverse tendency, among theologians, to make light of and neglect the ministrations of the handmaids. No wonder that so many of our arguments and illustrations should be weak and our conclusions distorted, based as they are on false Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Archæology, History, Criticism, and so on. For Theology is not faith, but a science; with one foot on God's Word, while the other rests on man's testimony and on nature. He who would be a philosopher must study nature constantly-must make all the use he can of the ascertained conclusions of all the physical sciences; and he who would be a theologian must be a historian as well as a philosopher. And as it is not given to any one man to be all these, we can only say that a school of Philosophy and Theology that is out of touch with those of Science and History, is standing on one leg-a position not of stable equilibrium. That is the danger to which we are exposed at Maynooth.

It may be asked why we should not hope to have such intercourse with the University as would keep us abreast of the times. I do not know, if it be not that we are at the wrong side of Dublin; or it may be that there is about seminaries an exclusiveness which frightens off and chills the laity. Whatever may have been the cause, there has been very little intercourse in my time between the staff here and those who have been engaged in any form of scientific or historical research in Dublin; and,

candidly, I do not hope for much improvement in this respect— as long as we stay here. With a new tendency among the best men, even of the clergy, to seek a field of labour and higher earthly rewards in the University rather than here, in Arts and Philosophy rather than Theology, the prospects of the Queen of Sciences are not all rosy-in Ireland.

What will be the effect of this on the University? The men -especially those in the Faculty of Philosophy and the students of History-will have no theological school to criticize and steady them; at least they will not be in living touch with any, which is what is wanted; and there is but too much reason to fear that the result will be what it has been wherever the same experiment has been tried.

I think I love this College as much as most of its children. I have spent more years in it than any other living man save one; I have never had the least desire to leave it; it has been and is to me almost an ideal home. Situated though it is in the midst of an uninteresting plain, and poor and rough as its life may be, it is a life of freedom and independence, and offers great facilities for study; all of which I value more than anything else after life and the grace of God.

Maynooth, however, is not mere stone walls; it is the men that make it, and the traditions, and the spirit. We could not carry the walls with us as Aeneas could not carry those of Troy; but we could have the same men, the same spirit, the same traditions; we could build up a new Maynooth, which, like the new Troy, might be destined for a wider empire.63

Moscow was hoary with age and venerable for its traditions; yet the Russians, who loved and reverenced it so, burnt it to save the country and itself. And they did save both. At a later date their grandsons were called on to abandon a newer and less venerable fortress, and they did not; therein failing in true service to their country.

63 All lectures, whether in Trinity College or any new College or University that may be founded, are and will be open to all students, wherever they reside. Ecclesiastical students could have their own hospice, as Dr. Healy suggests, with regular seminary life, without forfeiting the right of attending lectures at the University.

I do not say or believe that we are called on to give up Maynooth altogether; but I do feel it a mighty responsibility that those are taking who are leaving this new College or University for Catholics without a Church-directed Faculty of Theology to steady it; leaving it to shift for itself as best it can with little more than the external guidance supplied by parochial churches -a weekly lecture or two in Apologetics and Ecclesiastical History, and a Faculty of Kantian, Hegelian, or the latest brand of Philosophy.

WALTER MACDONALD.

ST. PATRICK'S COLLEGE,

MAYNOOTH.

THE NEW PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE.1

II. THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.

We have set forth in a former article what the New Philosophy considers to be the subject matter, the method and the value of Philosophy, that is to say, we have exposed its principles of metaphysics,-metaphysics and philosophy being ultimately identical. In order to give the full presentation of the system necessary for the formation of a judgment regarding this school, it will be necessary to state its principles of psychology. For in this school not only does psychology serve as an introduction to metaphysics, and furnish the elements with which metaphysics is constructed, but metaphysics is indeed the result of the fullest and deepest application of psychology to reality and the true psychology necessarily ends in metaphysics.

Especially since the time of Locke and Hume, psychology and epistemology have been considered as sciences distinct from metaphysics; the former as the science of internal facts, the latter as the science of the value of knowledge. These two sciences have been, to a great extent, the field of study for the philosophical mind in the nineteenth century. While Kant in Germany devoted his energies to the critical problem, followed in this direction by Hamilton in Scotland, the Scottish School under the influence of Reid and Dugald Stewart emphasized the conception of psychology as a distinct science and insisted upon the internal observation and reflection as its proper method. The Eclectic School in France was nothing more than a branch of the Scottish School, while in England Stuart Mill applied the method of analysis already inaugurated by Hume and developed the theory of associationism.

It was then generally acknowledged that psychology is a science independent of metaphysics, that it is the science of internal phenomena. Under the influence of Auguste Comte,

Cf. The Catholic University Bulletin, April, 1906.

the conception of science became more strictly defined; it implied the use of a precise method. By the psychologists of the Scottish and Eclectic Schools psychology had been studied by means of internal observation only; it had been rather descriptive. Stuart Mill himself with more subtlety of analysis had not gone much beyond the data of common sense. Auguste Comte denied the value of introspection, and others, while accepting its legitimacy, found it too vague to furnish the basis of a truly scientific study.

At that time natural sciences, physics and physiology were making great progress; physicists and physiologists were confronted by the problems of psychology; they did not hesitate to study them. John Muller enunciated the law of the specification of the nerves, and what is more notable, he with other physiologists, called attention to the close connection existing between psychological phenomena and their physiological causes or effects and consequently between psychological phenomena and their physical conditions and results. The study of this connection seemed to make it possible to arrive not only at a descriptive, but even at an explanatory knowledge of the facts of consciousness. We may now not only observe them, but through their physiological and physical conditions we are able to experiment on them. Psychology, as an experimental science, is possible.

The first students of the new science, most of them physicists and physiologists of great renown, such as Dubois-Raymond, Helmholtz, Donder, Exner and others, in the study of physiological phenomena, took the physical conditions as the chief basis of their explanation and attempted to measure both the duration and the intensity of psychical facts. Weber enunciated his famous "logarithmic law" of the relations between the physical stimulus and the sensation, which was perfected by Fechner and later by Delboeuf and Sergi. This constitutes in experimental psychology the psycho-physical tendency. I say tendency rather than school or period, for although giving the first place in their explanations to the physical conditions, they give not a little importance to the physiological factors.

With Wundt and his disciples physiological conditions took