Philosophy is the science of Life. Its problem is to find the Ultimate from which we may explain the origin of man and nature, determine the laws of their growth, obtain a presentiment of their destiny, and become inspired with a pure and noble zeal to live and die for the glory of God, and the progress of mankind.

There is and can be no higher problem than this, none more worthy to engage the whole force of our minds and our hearts. It is the problem of problems; it includes all other problems; and on its solution depend all other problems for theirs. We have answered no question, whether of man or nature, of society, religion, or morals, till we have traced it to the Ultimate, beyond which there is no question to be asked, or to be answered.

But the Ultimate for ever escapes us. It recedes always in proportion as we advance; and is never seized save in a finite and relative form. The complete solution, therefore, transcends, and for ever must transcend, the reach of our powers. All that we can do, and all that we should attempt, is to obtain the solution that shall meet the wants and satisfy the heart of our own epoch. This solution, though it must one day needs be outgrown, as we outgrow the garments of our childhood, will, nevertheless, bring us a measure of peace, become the point of departure for new inquirers, and pave the way for new and more adequate solutions.

Orestes Brownson. “Synthetic Philosophy”

It is easy to lie with statistics, but easier to lie without them.

Frederick Mosteller

Any change whatever except from evil is the most dangerous of all things.

Plato, Laws No. 797

“Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”

Abraham Lincoln (July 4 1861)

The state of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. All over the world, until quite modern times the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain men are being forced to bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, have made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. But let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. But the man who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her himself is fatal. A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death.

C.S. Lewis

Try to crack the nut yourself; it will hurt your hands, but it will break, and St. Thomas himself will instruct his pupil. For this end, as you read each article, consult carefully the different passages to which the editions refer you; consult the Index Tertius, an imperfect treasure, but a treasure all the same; compare text with text; make the different sources of information complete and illustrate one another, and draw up your own article. It is an excellent gymnastic, which will give your mind flexibility, vigor, precision, breadth, hatred of sophistry and of inexactitude, and at the same time insure you a progressively increasing store of notions that will be clear, deep, consecutive, always linked up with their first principles and forming by their interadaptation a sound synthesis.

Sertillanges (on the exercise of composing articles like those of St. Thomas)

The philosopher today is therefore pressed, and simply by reason of his objective social role in the community, into an imitation of the scientist: he too seeks to perfect the weapons of his knowledge through specialization. Hence the extraordinary preoccupation with technique among modern philosophers, with logical and linguistic analysis, syntax and semantics; and in general with the refining away of all content for the sake of formal subtlety. The movement known as Logical Positivism, in this country (the atmosphere of humanism is probably more dominant in the European universities than here in the United States), actually trafficked upon the guilt philosophers felt at not being scientists; that is, at not being researchers producing reliable knowledge in the mode of science. The natural insecurity of philosophers, which in any case lies at the core of their whole uncertain enterprise, was here aggravated beyond measure by the insistence that they transform themselves into scientists.

Barret, Irrational Man 6

We no longer believe that progress is a necessary and automatic process, and that if men are left free to follow their own devices they will inevitably grow wiser and happier and more prosperous. We admit the reality of modern progress as a vast material achievement, but it means something very different from what our predecessors believed. Human life, like animal life, depends on a balance of forces, and if the balance is upset by the removal of restrictive factors, the process of readjustment is full of danger and difficulty.

Thus the rapid growth of wealth and population which followed on the Industrial Revolution does not continue indefinitely; it creates its own limits by calling into existence new restrictive forces. Machinery makes possible a vast expansion of industry, but it also leads to over-production and unemployment. Science increases man’s control over disease, but it also adds to the destructiveness of war. Colonial and economic expansion gives Europe the hegemony of the world, but it also awakens the hostility and rivalry of the oriental peoples. Capitalism creates new sources of wealth, but it also involves exploitation and social unrest.

Christopher Dawson

The disorder of the modern world is due either to the denial of the existence of spiritual reality or to the attempt to treat the spiritual order and the business of everyday life as two independent worlds which have no mutual relations. But while Catholicism recognizes the distinction and the autonomy of the natural and the supernatural orders, it can never acquiesce in their segregation. The spiritual and the eternal insert themselves into the world of sensible and temporal things, and there is not the smallest event in human life and social history but possesses an eternal and spiritual significance.

Christopher Dawson

What I am against – and without a minute’s hesitation or apology – is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystem and human communities where we do our work.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle