crediting of this third
tradition with every prospect of a great advance if our own time can
only find its Descartes. In what I am going on to say I must naturally
speak of the disintegrating influences chiefly as we have seen them at
work in our own country; but I should like, before I do so, to remark
that on the Continent splendid work has been done in the requickening of
genuine philosophical thought by an influence which has, so far, not
made itself widely felt among ourselves. I mean the revival of Thomism
so earnestly promoted in the academies of the Roman Church by Pope Leo
XIII. Neo-Thomism, I am convinced, if its representatives will only
maintain it at the high level characteristic, for example, of the
Italian _Rivista Neo-Scolastica_, has a very great contribution to make
to the Philosophy of the future, and is much more deserving of the
serious attention of students in our own country than the
much-advertised 'impressionism' of Pragmatists and Bergsonians. Indeed,
I hardly know how much we may not hope from the movement if it should
please Providence to send into the world a Neo-Thomist who is also a
really qualified mathematician.

Of the state of thought in our own country we may fairly say that a
generation ago opinion on the ultimate questions was, in the main,
fairly divided into two camps. There were the professional
metaphysicians, mainly living on a tradition derived from Kant and
Hegel, and there were the men of science whose 'philosophy', such as it
was, is perhaps best represented by two well-known and most instructive
books, Mach's _Science of Mechanics_ and Karl Pearson's _Grammar of
Science_. The men of the Kant-Hegel tradition, whatever their family
dissensions, were generally united by the common view that--as William
James accused them of teaching--the function of sensation in
contributing to knowledge, whatever it is, is something 'contemptible'.
Kant himself, as we have seen, had thought very differently, but he was
supposed to have been 'corrected' on this, as on so many points, by
Hegel. The most distinguished of my own Oxford teachers seemed agreed to
believe that our thought builds up the fabric of knowledge entirely from
within by what Hegel called an 'immanent dialectic'. A rough idea of
what this means may be given in the following way. You take any
experience you please and try to put what you experience into a
proposition. The proposition may, to begin with, be as vague as, e.g.