Overview of 18th &
19th Century Philosophy

A Study and Critique

The
philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries carried forward, in the main, the
theories of Bacon, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and tried to reason
the world out of existence. Existence is reduced to thoughts or idea, to
will-force or elan. This is nothing new, nor was it new in the 18th or 19th
century. It is the core of the old Eleatic
philosophy, and it is latent in every sophist, skeptic, and relativist theory
of things and thoughts.

We
shall discuss very briefly the doctrines of Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Comte, Spencer, James, and Bergson,
with incidental mention of Fichte, von Schelling, Mill, and Dewey. We shall notice the revival of
Classical Realism.

1. George Berkeley (1695-1753), Kilkenny born, and
Protestant Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, was idealist in philosophy,
but not in such matter of fact things as money. He worked hard to secure a
grant from the English Government for the purpose of founding in Bermuda a great college to train
missionaries for the conversion of America. Indeed, he had the promise of
20,000, and, on the strength of it, he went to Rhode Island to secure the interest and help
of New Englanders. But the politicians failed him; the promised money was not
voted.

Perhaps
his experience with practical politics helped turn him into an utter idealist
-- but no, attractive as the thought remains, it cannot be so; for Berkeley's significant writing was all
done by 1715, and he did not visit America until 1728. His chief
philosophical work was a treatise on The Principles of Human Understanding.

Notice
how steadily the basic question, that is, the epistemological question, held
the attention of all philosophers during the centuries of the early modern era.
And still that question was not sanely treated nor brought to full answer.
Despite their constant cry for clarity in knowledge, the philosophers of this
time succeeded only in making knowledge more misty and valueless.

Berkeley goes confidently to work to
explain the human mind and its relation to reality. He says that if anything
exists at all, it exists as knowable, and there exists a mind capable of
knowing it. Further, each man's knowing is what gives him the
world he knows. The very being of things is, for each person who knows
them, the perceiving of them: esse
est percipi,
"to exist is to be perceived."

Now,
there is ultimate reality in the Divine Mind. Each human mind somehow shares
the creative perceiving of the Divine Mind. Thus while Berkeley is idealist, he is not utter
subjectivist. He once wrote, "I question not the existence of anything we
perceive by our senses." But he should have added that
"existence" means to him "existence in the mind," and
basically in the Divine Mind.

2. David Hume
(1711-1776), native of Edinburgh and a product of its
university, denied the existence of all substantial reality, material or
spiritual. In his Treatise on Human Nature he declares that man's mind
is only a collection of perceptions. These perceptions are either impressions
or ideas. Impressions are sensations of pleasure, pain, awareness of
qualities and relations. Ideas are but the faintly remembered images of
impressions formerly experienced. This vague philosophy has a very modern
sound: a collection of impressions collected nowhere; contents of a mind which
is not a container. Here we have the smug unintelligibility of the modern
neo-realist's definition of mind as "a cross-section of the
environment."

Hume
does not deny God, but he denies the value of the customary proofs for God's
existence, since these are based upon a reality which he does not accept. He is
inconsistent, however, for in his Natural History of Religion he writes:
"The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent Author."

In
morals, Hume set up the public good as the standard of right and wrong,
and assigns to feelings rather than to reason the task of
applying this ethical norm.

In
summary, Hume holds that the only thing that can be said, with full certainty,
to exist are our perceptions (impressions and ideas). In and among these
perceptions there is no causal connection; indeed, there is no knowable
causality anywhere. If things outside us really do exist, there is no proof of
their existence available to us.

3. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a professor in Germany, in his native city of Koenigsberg, and read Hume's arguments with
dismay, and finally tossed them aside with contempt as "dogmatic
dreams." Hume takes away all grounds of certitude; the best a man might
have of him is a thin probability, and this, as Kant noticed, is not usable
knowledge at all. What a man needs, said Kant, and what he can have is truly
scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge that is universally and
necessarily true and reliable.

The experiences
of the senses is individual, and, no matter how consistently and for how long a
time the senses find a fact solid, there is always the possibility that the
next experience will show to vary. So far Kant agrees with Hume:
sense-experience cannot give the mind more than probability. But, said Kant,
there is another element in knowledge, an a priori and subjective
element which is anterior to sense-experience and in no wise dependent on it.
This is the element which enables us to have true and certain knowledge and to
add item to item with complete security in building up the edifice of science.

We
pause here to settle the meaning of important terms. Knowledge that we obtain
through experience is a posteriori knowledge, that is, it comes after
experience and is dependent upon it. Now, it is Aristotelian, Scholastic, and
Classical Realistic doctrine that all human knowledge is of this type;
no knowledge is born in us; no item of knowledge exists in man except such as
has been acquired.

Kant,
however, insisted on the existence of certain "forms" or items of
knowledge (space and time, certain regulative judgments, and certain
master-ideas) as inborn and a priori. Of course, there is a
legitimate use of the terms a priori and a posteriori
(literally "from beforehand" and "from afterwards") in
describing types of argument. But there is no legitimate use of a priori
as a term descriptive of knowledge itself. Kant uses the term so, and he
follows the despised Hume so far as to make the knowledge described by this
term a very part of the mind of man, an element of its being and not
merely an element of its equipment.

To
answer the basic question, "What can I know with scientific
certitude?" Kant wrote his book The Critique of Pure Reason. In
this work, Kant assigns to man a threefold knowing-power: sensibility,
intellect, reason. Knowable things, on the other hand, are of two classes:
appearances of things or phenomena, and essences of things or noumena.

Man,
by sensibility (that is, by his senses) takes in the phenomena of the world
about him. Somehow, we know not how, the phenomena set his sense-power to work;
we dare not say that the senses perceive even the phenomena as these exist in
nature; we may only say that somehow phenomena stir the senses to act.

Now the
formal constituent, the essential element, of the sensing-power or sensibility
(that is, its character or "shape") is the twofold determination of space-and-time.
Man has sense-experiences "here" and "now," and he recalls
them as "there" and "then." But this conditioning of
phenomena by space and time is man's own contribution to the
knowledge-act. Space and time in no wise represent things, nor are they things;
they are the inborn a priori element of the sensing-power.

Just
as a curiously shaped bottle will take in liquid or powder and conform the mass
of the substance taken in to its own shape, so the sensing-power, which
has the shape of space-and-time, takes in the action of phenomena on the
senses and shapes these phenomena accordingly. The result (that is,
phenomena-conditioned-by-space-and-time) is called empirical intuition.

Now,
just as phenomena stir the sensibility to act, so the finished products of
sensation (that is, empirical intuitions) stir the next knowing power, the
intellect, to act. The intellect takes in the empirical intuitions and conforms them to its shape, its own inborn a
priori forms. These forms are four sets of triple judgments, called the
twelve categories. These are like grooves or molds into which the molten
metal of empirical intuitions is poured, and the resultant piece of knowledge
is, in each case, a judgment.

The
four master categories (each of which has three branches) are: quantity,
quality, relation, and modality. Thus the judgment "A comes
from B as effect from cause" is not the objective knowing by the mind of a
state of fact; it is merely the result of the action of intellect
turning the sense-findings (or empirical intuitions) of A and B through the
groove (or category) of relation, and through that branch of relation
called cause-effect.

Once
more, just as the finished products of sensibility (that is, empirical
intuitions) stir the intellect to the act of judging, so the judgments of the
intellect stir the reason to its action. The innate a priori
shape of reason is determined by three master-ideas: the idea of the
self, the idea of the not-self, the idea of the super-self.
In other words, the three regulative ideas of reason are the ideas of self, the
world, and God. The judgments of intellect are poured through the threefold
mold of reason, and the result is reasoned knowledge.

Now,
the essential thing about knowledge, when we attempt to fix its value on the
score of truth and certitude, centers in judgments. After all, reason
merely handles judgments and learns from them. Upon judgments we must fix our
attention. There are two types of judgment, a priori and a
posteriori. Looked at in another way, there are two other types: synthetic
and analytic. We already know the meaning of a priori and a posteriori,
and indeed, according to Kant, all judgments are a priori. We
must look at the other terms.

A
judgment is rightly called synthetic when it is "put
together," for that is precisely what the word synthetic means. If
I make the judgment, "John is sick," I have a synthetic judgment; the
predicate does not necessarily belong to the subject, but I put it with
the subject because I have learned from John or from his doctor that it happens
to belong there.

But if
I make the judgment, "A circle is round," I have an analytic
judgment; for by analyzing the subject, by studying it and knowing just what it
is, I learn that the predicate used belongs
there, since a circle to be a circle must be round.

Kant
held that the only judgment which can give absolute certitude must be a
priori, since, indeed, he admits no other type. But, he maintains, an a
priori judgment that is analytic marks no advance in knowledge. To
build up science, there must be growth, development, advancement. Hence there
must be synthetic judgments which are also a priori. The synthetic
a priori judgment may be called the heart of Kant's philosophy.

And we
may say now in passing that the synthetic a priori judgment is a
contradiction in terms and in thought; it is an impossibility.
The examples offered by Kant are either (in our terminology) a posteriori
judgments, or they are analytic judgments. For instance, Kant says that
the judgment "five plus seven equals twelve" is a synthetic a
priori judgment. It is nothing of the kind. It is a simple analytic
judgment. Replace the words or the figures for five and seven and twelve by an
equivalent number of dots or strokes; you will have exactly the same thing on
either side of the equals-mark. The judgment is as plainly analytic as "A
is A."

Let us
cast back a moment, and make a summing up of the Kantian theory of human
knowing:

Notice
that the sole point of connection of man's knowledge with reality outside the
mind is the vague influence of phenomena on the sensing-power. From that point
on, the whole process of knowing, and its products, are man's own. Here is idealism, here is subjectivism with a
vengeance. And Kant plainly asserts that the noumena
or essences of things cannot be known by man. The phenomenon is not strictly
knowable, but it moves the senses to act; the noumenon
is not knowable at all. The noumenon lies outside the
reach of mortal man.

So
Kant is as subjectivistic as Hume ever dared to be.
And yet this is the man who threw Hume's book aside with the sneer,
"Dogmatic dreams!" What singular smugness could have made Kant
suppose that he was dealing with the problem of knowledge critically and
not dogmatically? Yet he calls his system "transcendental criticism."

Since
we cannot know noumena, the science of metaphysics,
the very heart of philosophy as the Greeks and Classical Realists understand
it, becomes illusory and impossible. Is it not strange that a man of Kant's
undoubted intellectual gifts did not notice here an absurd contradiction? Why,
he has just finished explaining to us, in great detail, the whole nature of the
human mind; and now he concludes that we cannot know the nature of anything!
And his reasoning -- more than "slightly foxed" as the booksellers say
-- about the character of the mind, and about the nature of phenomena and noumena, is actually interwoven with terms and thoughts
metaphysical; yet he says that metaphysics is illusory and impossible!

So
far, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It will be noticed that the
doctrine contained in this work opens the way to complete skepticism, and
therewith it opens the way to a denial of moral obligation and of purpose in
human existence. For if nothing can be known with certitude, as skepticism
maintains, then there are no certainties in the realm of morals, religion, or
social duties; then there is no certainty that man is made for a purpose at all, or even that man exists.

Whether
Kant noticed this fact, and, as a Lutheran, deplored it, or whether (as has
been said) his Emperor summoned him and demanded that he furnish a
philosophical basis for morals and religion, cannot be said. But Kant wrote a
second book to supply the defects mentioned. He said that pure reason is
not enough for man; he must live by practical reason as well.

In his
first book, Kant sought the answer to the question, "What can man know
with certitude?" The answer was, "He can have true certitude by his synthetic
a priori judgments." But this is mere statement. The real
answer to which Kant's work inclines the thinking mind is, "Man can know
nothing with certitude."

Kant's
second book, The Critique of Practical Reason, answered the question,
"Are there certitudes, outside the reach of pure reason,
that I must recognize and act upon?" Kant answers with an emphatic,
"There are." These truths are known with certitude by practical
reason. First, a man is aware of duty. He knows with clear certitude
that murder and stealing are wrong, and that he has the indispensable duty of
avoiding such things. He knows that there are certain loyalties which indicate
things that he is in duty bound to observe and do. By his practical reason, man
is aware of the inner command, "Thou shalt"
and "Thou shalt not."

This
command is categorical, that is, it is unconditional; it is not,
"Do this, if you please," "Avoid that when convenient"; it
is a matter of simple "Do" and "Avoid." Kant calls this
inner voice The Categorical Imperative. A Christian would call it
conscience, and would explain that it is the voice of reason (the same reason
with which we work out a theorem in geometry) pronouncing on the agreement or
disagreement of a situation (here and now to be decided) with the norm or law
of morality. Kant's Categorical Imperative is like conscience in its
clear decision and unequivocal command; it is entirely unlike conscience in its
blindly unreasoning assumption of authority.

First,
then, man's awareness of duty is a certitude; it is a certitude because of The
Categorical Imperative. Now, this Categorical Imperative is a law. But a
law must come from a lawmaker. Neither I myself have set up my Categorical
Imperative (for it often orders me to do what I should like to avoid, and to
shun what I would willingly do) nor has it come from any earthly kind, court,
or senate, for it speaks with an authority that is absolute and not one
supported by temporal sanctions of fine or imprisonment. It is a supreme law;
it is an absolute law. It must come then from the Supreme and Absolute Being.
That is, it must come from God. Therefore, God Exists.

Further,
the Categorical Imperative makes a man aware, not only of duty, but of the fact
that he must freely embrace the performance of duty. He is aware that he can
disregard, although he cannot be ignorant of, this law of conduct. In a word,
he is aware, and with true certitude, that he is a free and responsible
being. Again, man, a free and responsible being, is aware that by freely
acting in accordance with the commands of the Categorical Imperative he
perfects himself. And he is aware that this self-perfecting may go on
through the longest life without reaching the limits of its capability.
Therefore, he concludes, he can go on becoming more and more perfect forever.

In
other words, man is aware of endless existence before him; he knows he has
an immortal soul. Thus out of the cunning device of The Categorical
Imperative Kant draws the doctrines that satisfy his Lutheranism (or his
Emperor), although his basic philosophy of "transcendental criticism"
knows nothing of these doctrines. He sets forth, in orthodox fashion, the practical
truths of the existence of God, the fact of moral duty, the immortality of the
soul, the freedom of the human will.

Kant
wrote a third book, The Critique of the Faculty of Aesthetic Judgment in
which he brings out the attractiveness of moral goodness in a manner more
striking than that of The Critique of Practical Reason.

Despite
errors, absurdities, and contradictions, Kant's philosophy -- notably that of The
Critique of Pure Reason -- has exercised a tremendous influence upon human
thinking for almost two centuries. It exhibits the roots of those weaknesses we
have come to regard as characteristic of what is loosely called "the
German philosophy":

A
final word on Kant.
In offering and defending his low estimate of pure reason as incapable of
achieving certitude (apart from the mysterious judgments which are synthetic a
priori) Kant appeals to his so-called "antinomies" or
"contradictions." He holds that when pure reason tries to apply the
categories in the abstract realm of logical inference (whereas its business is
to pour findings through fixed molds) it gets beyond itself and comes a
cropper.

It
finds that it can prove, with equal facility, things directly opposed. Thus, he
says, it can prove that space is finite, and also infinite; it can prove matter
divisible and indivisible; it can prove human freedom existent and nonexistent;
it can prove that God is necessary and also non-necessary. In all this, and in
the examples offered in proof of it, Kant is entirely gratuitous and
sophistical.

Besides,
he stands self-condemned in using logical reasoning to establish the fact that
logical reasoning is useless. We merely mention the "antinomies"
because we discern in them an element of materialism in the heart of an idealistic
theory. This materialism was to appear in full form in later philosophies which
took inspiration, at least in part, from the doctrines of Immanuel Kant.

4.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814) and Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling (1775-1854) were two followers of Kant
who taught that the mysterious noumenon of Kant is
the projection of an Absolute Ego. This Ego sets up Self
as against the background of Not-Self and then realizes that after all Self and
Not-Self are truly One. Technically, we have the thesis, the antithesis
and the synthesis of the Absolute Ego. The final synthesis in which the
Ego "composits the Self and the Not-Self"
is the developing and perfecting of Will.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel
(1770-1831) was by far the most important among the immediate followers of
Kant. To Hegel the synthesizing element which merges Self
and Not-Self is universal awareness, absolute reason. Individual men have
reason, but the human reason is but a gleam of the Absolute Light. The world is
merely phenomenal, it is an external expression of Absolute Reason; it
is a series of flashes and shadows cast by the Cosmic Light of Reason.

Towards
the perfect harmony of Absolute Reason everything (as history proves) works
upward, not sweepingly, but step by step, each more perfectly harmonizing and
purifying than the preceding. In a civil State, this drive towards Reason shows
itself under the aspect of Will. As one nation conquers another, and
then is conquered in turn, we note the purifying and harmonizing drive towards
Reason. Such successive steps towards the ideal were, first, the oriental
State, then the Roman State, and, last and best expression
of progress, the German State. Progress must go by conflict
and through the conquest of contradictions.

5. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is a name popularly known as almost synonymous
with "pessimism." He denied the existence of happiness for man, and
felt that the best man could hope for was an occasional relief from pain:
"life is a path of red-hot coals, with a cool spot here and there."
Schopenhauer declared that will is the very essence of things. This will
is not a force guided by intelligence or reason; it is a blind, irresistible
drive. It is not a striving for something as a goal; it is a drive that exists
for itself. This is a world-will. It is manifest
everywhere, in the force of gravitation and in the most sublime tendencies of
men towards their ideals.

The
apparent world is phenomenal; it is our conception of things; it is idea
which we explain sufficiently for our needs as space, time, causality.
But there is a real world too, a noumenal
world, which is not idea but will. The world-will is active in
us; it is very hard upon us; it makes us strive ceaselessly for what we can
never find, that is, peace, rest, and enduring satisfaction. Thus it is a
source of pain. Man may find a partial and temporary relief from this pain by
contemplating works of art. But a more lasting relief comes from resisting
will; from the effort to kill within oneself the desire for continued life,
health, property, comfort, friends; from refusing the
work of seeking to attain such goals as eternal rest, heaven, moral ideals.

Schopenhauer
is of the later German school in his doctrine of all embracing will, but he is
alone among German philosophers in ascribing to the efforts of universal will
no goal, no good, no improvement.

6. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900). Schopenhauer was saddened by the pain that men
must endure through the harsh and profitless drive of world-will. But Nietzsche
was gladdened by it. For, said Nietzsche, the pain and strife of existence are
meant to harden us, to strengthen us, to develop us so that we may ultimately
produce superman.

We
should therefore be ruthless, hard, unsympathetic; we
should refuse to indulge self or others; we should sternly cultivate the
will to power. Christianity, said Nietzsche, with its doctrines of
obedience, resignation, loving kindness, is not the guide we require; it
proclaims a slave morality. We need no God, no supernatural aim. The aim of
true ethics is the development of the great, the strong, the ruthless blond beast,
the superman.

We
need not pause upon the absurdity of this doctrine of Nietzsche, which, as G.K
Chesterton points out is not a philosophy of strong muscles but of weak nerves.
Indeed, Nietzsche was himself a man of such weak nerves as to be hardly sane.
It is interesting to note that the philosophy of ruthless will to power
found itself an expression in the ideals and the warlike actions of many of
Nietzsche's countrymen just a mere sixty years ago.

7. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). The ethics of
Nietzsche are a crude and brutal naturalism, that is, a theory that man
needs no power but his own, and no aim beyond this world. Naturalism is one
form of materialism which denies or disregards everything spiritual and
supernatural.

Naturalistic
ethics appear in the mistaken philosophies of all ages, proclaiming men are
naturally good, naturally directed upwards and onwards, and urging that he be
left unhindered and undirected so that through the fullest self-expression he
may come to perfection.

The
Classical Realist knows, however, than man's nature is not perfect and that no
man can be merely natural and remain decent. A man,
says Chesterton, must be supernatural or he will be unnatural. Nietzsche set up
a naturalistic doctrine in crude and harsh terms. The same type of doctrine was
presented more subtly by Comte, Mill, and Spencer.

Comte
says that man has passed naturally through three intellectual stages:
the theological stage,
in which he referred power and control to Deity;
the metaphysical stage,
in which he sought to understand things in the general abstractions of
philosophy; and finally,
the true and perfect
positive stage, in which he finds all knowledge in the mathematical
and experimental sciences, chief of which is sociology, the science of
humanity.

According
to Comte, humanity is the only God.

Mill
declares that man must be guided in his actions by utility. Actions are
good or evil in so far as they preserve us from pain or subject us to pain
(moral utilitarianism): Utility or usefulness is not to be judged selfishly; it
is to be sought in the greatest pleasure of the greatest number of men. We
learn, for the most part, by the method of "trial and error" in what
courses of action such utility is to be found.

Spencer
discards the "trial and error" method. He says we must study nature
and adjust ourselves to it so that we may act for the greatest pleasure of the
greatest number. We are helped in our effort by natural evolution which
tends to level out differences among men.

All
nature is marked by a steady progress "from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous" and we must not get ahead of this process or we shall have
trouble and pain and the world will be filled with unrest. Nor must we be eager
for absolute truth either in science or in religion.

Truth
is for us always relative, for the ultimate always eludes our grasp.
Science must be content with the positive data which fall under observation of
the senses (sensism and positivism), and religion (or
theology) must be content to make rules for practical conduct, leaving aside
all doctrinal and dogmatic statements about the Great Unknown (agnosticism).

Spencer
is full of self-contradiction. He professes to know the absolute truth that
absolute truth is unknowable. He is dogmatic in his assertion that dogmatic
assertion is unseemly. He limits science to positive sense-data, and this very
theory is not capable of either expression or proof in terms of sense-data, and
hen is, by his own standard, a wholly unscientific theory. His doctrine of
natural evolution is a hypothesis which he proposes as absolute truth. Indeed,
Spencer makes mankind a single organism which is growing steadily more
diversified and perfect by the process of evolution.

8. John Dewey
(1859-1952), an American philosopher, advanced the sensism
and positivism of Spencer, together with the agnostic and relativist theory.
Dewey thinks that philosophy must concern itself with the discovery of
practical rules to keep men in accord with the march of events. Philosophy is
but a guide for action. True and false are to be understood in
the light of social experience; what has proved beneficial to man is true and
good; what has been found socially harmful is evil and false. This doctrine is
usually called pragmatism from the Greek pragma,
a deed, work, or action.

9. William James (1842-1910) is usually regarded as "the father of
pragmatism." James teaches that the working or workability of a thing (for
man's benefit or hurt) is the test of its good or evil, its truth or falsity.
Besides the test of workability, two others are to be applied: any new idea, to
be true, must be in harmony with ideas already tested and proved true;
secondly, the new idea must not conflict with accepted ideals, especially
those that are religious or moral.

James
says that man's mind requires certitude in many matters in which his mental
power is not adequate to attain it. Where the mind fails, the will must step in
and make a decision. Indeed, a man cannot avoid such intervention of the will.
If he says, "I cannot decide; I must remain in doubt," he is actually
willing not to decide; he, in fact, deciding not to decide.

Now, a
decision to leave important matters unsettled is less valuable to man, less
practical, less useful, less workable, than a
straightforward affirmation or denial. Since decision must be made in any case,
it is better to have a clear decision than a muddled one. Therefore, a man
should have "the will to believe" either one or other of the
contradictory answers to important questions. Thus is the will invoked in the
philosophic pursuit of truth.

10. Henri Bergson (1859-1940). James calls upon
the will to help man interpret (indeed to create) truth. But Bergson, a French Jew, calls rather upon man's feeling.
He calls for a sympathetic effort after truth, not a cold analysis. He says
that to know truth we must sympathetically enter into things and know them from
within. Thus we must seek truth by intuition, by direct, sympathetic,
non-rationalized grasp. It is thus that we are aware of self, and of
self as part of a living and pulsating nature of things, the inner force
of which (or elan vital) is a continuously creative power.

Bergson was much influenced by the
teachings of Plotinus. In the last years of his life,
leaving the sterile philosophy of elan vital, he recognized the truth of
Catholicism, which he called "the complete fulfillment of Judaism."
Yet he failed to enter the Catholic Church, lest his conversion seem one of
convenience to escape the hardships of impending anti-Semitism. He did ask,
however, that a Catholic priest be present to pray at his funeral.

11. Conclusion. The philosophies of the last three centuries have been, in
the main, futile vagaries, born of a fundamental misconception of the nature of
human knowledge. The epistemological question has been the chief point of interest, and out of
the mistaken solution of this question have come, as a
natural consequence, mistaken doctrines in the realms of cosmology, psychology,
and ethics.

The 19th
century saw a notable revival, which continues to develop vigorously to the
present moment, of the ancient sanity known as Classical Realism in its various
forms (Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, Thomism, Contextual Realism). This noble system which alone has
historical and factual claim to the name of the true philosophy suffered an
almost total eclipse from the late 14th to the early 19th century

Classical
Realism, the philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy) is not made
"new" in each generation, but its insights and doctrines are employed
in studying and interpreting the newest findings of the modern experimental
sciences.