obtain in the higher. We find, however, that with nearly all creatures up to man a premium is put on deception. It is the weapon which the weak use against the strong; indeed, often the only effective one they have. Any work on natural history will afford illustration of the truth of the statement that deception is almost universal and has on it the stamp of success and so of moral obligation on Utilitarian principles. The flatfish which escapes the jaws of the dogfish is the one which can imitate most closely the color of the sand bank on which it lies. Some of the most remarkable mimetic insects yet discovered are certain bugs which have a most striking resemblance to thorns. One species in particular, the umbonia spinosa in South Africa, is an exact imitation of a large thorn such as is found upon a wild rose stem. The counterfeit is so thorough that to discover the umbonia on a thorny stem seems a task of which no bird would be capable.

We need not multiply instances which will readily occur to every one. Imitation, mimicry, deception prevail everywhere in the animal kingdom from the least to the highest, from the insect to the mother bird, which moves as if her wings were broken to entice the pursuer from her nest.

This process of deception has the sanction of success. Those who have been best at it have escaped the danger before which their less skillful relatives went down, and organized deception becomes the fit rule of conduct for all who have survived. It is preposterous. to think that out of this biological law of life there should have been evolved the supreme authority and obligation of truthfulness in the case of man; and remember that it does not make any difference to our position that the obligation of truthfulness is questioned by some evolutionists provided it be admitted (and what I think is unquestionable) that the generality of men recognize it.

Even when we turn to human life it cannot be shown on the hypothesis of evolution that the habit of telling the truth is beneficial, pleasurable or advantageous. The Utilitarian sanction for veracity is neither powerful nor universal. Few laws enforce it, nor is the social reprobation attaching to untruthfulness as such very severe. For though it is true that we profess indignation at deceit generally, as a matter of fact we are really angry only when the deceit is malicious or injurious to us. We resist calumny, cheating and hypocrisy because they harm us, not at all because they are untrue. Abstract the detraction and the mischief from the untruth, and we are at little pains to condemn it; let it take the direction of adulation, and people generally are pleased with it, and but for their modesty would applaud it.

We can find no basis, then, for the obligation of being truthful

in biological conditions or in the experience of men, and hence Utilitarianism utterly fails to account for it. And the same is demonstrably true in the case of other obligations, for instance, our respect for the lives of the aged and helpless whose maintenance is a burden to us, not to mention at all the plague-stricken and others whose very existence is a positive menace to society."

The truth is, of course, that Utilitarianism leaves out of sight the greater part of morality. That theory of morals and of obligation is by its apotheosis of the creature not only dwarfed, it is lop-sided. Our relation to our fellow-men is incidental and secondary in the true scheme of morality. We are under an obligation to avoid injuring our neighbors, but in our opinion, with all due deference to the great authorities on the other side,10 the ratio formalis of such obligation is the Divine Will exclusively. The many Catholics that hold a different view seem to be admitting the thin end of the wedge of Utilitarianism. God was bound, seeing that He had made men independent of one another, to sanction with His will certain relations between them; but if we trespass on the independence of our neighbors, though no doubt we violate their right, still our moral culpability consists formally not at all in the injury we do them, but in our violation of the Divine law.

It is to be noted, too, that in expounding the principles of ethics we explain what kind of life we ought to live, what end to accomplish; we say not merely thou shalt not, but thou shalt. So that even if we were to reach the time and state when it would be no longer necessary to say thou shalt not, the notion of obligation would remain and would make itself felt so long as there was a further progress to be made, a higher ideal to reach and a further end to be accomplished.

And remember that according to the evolutionists at least the ideal of human conduct is continually growing and seeking a higher statement and embodiment of itself as knowledge widens. Neither, then, by the attempt to resolve it into its elements nor by the prediction that it will fade away have Spencer and his friends succeeded in divorcing the idea of a Supreme Personal Lawgiver from our sense of moral obligation.

In conclusion, we contend that we have proved against many Catholics that on our own principles the knowledge of obligation, and hence of God to some extent, is assumed as a primary fact of consciousness-is something arising spontaneously within the mind and independent of external instruction as to its existence, though not perhaps as to its perfection. We have refuted evolutionists

"Principles of Moral Science," 75.

10 "Principles of Moral Science," 61.

who take up the same position by retorting on them their own theory as to the atheism of the lower races, and by showing that in paganism the traditional cult of the Gods had no beneficial influence at least on the morality of the people.

We may assume, I think (what seems a mere truism), that the sense of obligation does not arise from anything we owe our own individual natures, and we have tried to show against Utilitarians that it has no reference to the race in general and so has no raison d'être at all on empirical lines.

We are entitled, therefore, to assume that this better self within us represents and bears unmistakable evidence to the existence of the living God, who, though greater than conscience, speaks through conscience. Conscience, then, occupies the throne of the universe, and her voice is that of the eternal king to which all loyal subjects respond with rejoicing assent, and with the exulting hope that the right will triumph, they rejoice that God reigns forever in righteousness, and that the puny arguments of atheists will one day dissolve and melt away like the snowflake on a river.

Τ

HE Protestant tradition which presumes a priori that no good can possibly have come out of the Nazareth of the times before the Reformation, and especially the immediately preceding century, has served to obscure to an unfortunate degree the history of several hundred years extremely important in every department of education. Strange as it may seem to those unfamiliar with the period, it is in that department which is supposed to be so typically modern-the physical sciences-that this neglect is most serious. Such a hold has this Protestant tradition on even educated minds that it is a source of great surprise to most people to be told that there were in many parts of Europe original observers in the physical sciences all during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who were doing ground-breaking work of the highest value that was destined to mean much for the development of modern

science. Speculations and experiments with regard to the philosopher's stone and the transmutation of metals are supposed to fill up all the interests of the alchemists of those days. As a matter of fact, however, men were making original observations of very profound significance, and these were considered so valuable by their contemporaries that though printing had not yet been invented, even the immense labor involved in copying large folio volumes by hand did not suffice to deter them from multiplying the writings of these men and thus preserving them for future generations until the printing press came to perpetuate them.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces, under the influences of the peculiarly active light thrown upon older chemical theories by the discovery of radium and the radio active elements generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time chemical observers whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was considered so absurd. The idea that it would be impossible under any circumstances to convert one element into another belongs entirely to the nineteenth century. Even so distinguished a mind as that of Newton, in the preceding century, could not bring itself to acknowledge the modern supposition of the absurdity of metallic transformation, but, on the contrary, believed very firmly in this as a basic chemical principle and confessed that it might be expected to occur at any time. He had seen specimens of gold ores in connection with metallic copper, and had concluded that this was a manifestation of the natural transformation of one of these yellow metals into the other.

With the discovery that radium transforms itself into helium, and that indeed all the so-called radio activities of the very heavy metals are probably due to a natural transmutation process constantly at work, the ideas of the older chemists cease entirely to be a subject. for amusement. The physical chemists of the present day are very ready to admit that the old teaching of the absolute independence of something over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working hypothesis. The doctrine of matter and form taught for so many centuries by the scholastic philosophers that all matter is composed of two principles, an underlying material substratum and a dynamic or informing principle, has now more acknowledged verisimilitude or lies at least closer to the generally accepted ideas of the most progressive scientists than it has at any time for the last two or three centuries. Not only the great physicists, but the great chemists, are speculating along lines that suggest the existence of but one form of matter modified according to the energies that

it possesses under a varying physical and chemical environment. This is after all only a restatement in modern terms of the teaching of St. Thomas in the thirteenth century.

It is not surprising, then, that there should be a reawakening of interest in the lives of some of the men who, dominated by the earlier scholastic ideas and by the tradition of the possibility of finding the philosopher's stone, which would transmute the baser metals into the precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most interesting of these, indeed, he might well be said to be the greatest of the alchemists, is the man whose only name that we know is that which appears on a series of manuscripts written in the high German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, according to the best historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk. The name Basil Valentine may only have been a pseudonym, for it has been impossible to trace it among the records of the monasteries of the time. That the writer was a monk there seems to be no doubt, for his writings in manuscript and printed form began to have their vogue at a time when there was little likelihood of their being attributed to a monk unless an indubitable tradition connected them with some monastery.

This Basil Valentine, to accept the only name we have, as we can judge very well from his writings, eminently deserves the designation of the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. There is practically a universal recognition of the fact now that he deserves in addition the title of Founder of Modern Chemistry, not only because of the value of the observations contained in his writings, but also because of the fact that they proved so suggestive to certain scientific geniuses during the century succeeding Valentine's life. Almost more than to have added to the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind is it a boon for a scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of observation in others and to be the founder of a new school of thought. This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did.

Besides his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigating alone, but must have received as well as given many a suggestion to his contemporaries.

In the history of education there are two commonplaces that are appealed to oftener than any other as the sources of material with regard to the influence of the Catholic Church on education during the centuries preceding the Reformation. These are the supposed