For the great characteristic of the mental change between, say, 1885 and the present day, is the final segregation of Catholic philosophy from an opponent mood. That is the formula now applying to all the Occident, to all the one group of human beings who are variously called the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, the English, the more southern Germans of the Rhine and the Danube, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the Irish, and the Scotch.
It is this group of human beings which conducts the world and will probably continue to conduct it; for it has the best physical stock, the greatest energy, the greatest intelligence, and the strongest and most continuous will: and its colonies can never replace it. It has always been at the head of humanity, even before it acquired, through its conversion to Catholicism fifteen hundred years ago, those vast new powers which have since distinguished it. Before Western Europe had opportunities for conducting the world as a whole, it was still manifestly the greatest thing in the world, and when its soldierly adventurers and seamen, and its growing mastery over physical things gave it opportunity it took a place from which I do not think it can be dislodged.
Most modern men assume a shifting of the headship of the world from our regions to some other; as to Asia or to the New World. But as they base their calculation upon mere measurement they are sure to be wrong. They make their estimate of human affairs on the analogy of physical science: counting only what can be exactly calculated and noting only the growth or decline of numbers, in men, in goods, in speed.
But human affairs are moved from deeper springs altogether. A spirit moves them. It is by the acceptation, the denial, the renewal of philosophies that this society of immortal mortals is marked, changed, or restored.
The Catholic philosophy is, I say, today, at last clean separate from its opponent. Its opponent is losing all trace of Catholic dogma. That is the special mark of our time.
It is important to emphasise this position; unless we understand it, the future which is upon us will not be understood.
In the sixteenth century the unity of Western Christendom made shipwreck. But there did not then arise (as would seem to have been the necessary sequence when one reads the great men of the Renaissance, Erasmus, or any of the lesser ones) an immediate separation between the Catholic exposition of the world, the Catholic revelation, and a new scepticism. The process was much slower than that. It covered nearly four hundred years, and it went, as is a habit of human change, through very tortuous channels before it settled into its final form—which has now arrived.
First came a curious process of irrational selection in dogma. Nearly all those who were reacting against the authority of Catholic truth preferred to select a bundle of Catholic dogmas, and even of Catholic disciplines out of the total and to reject the remainder.
Most of those in revolt, for instance, accepted the Incarnation and the Trinity; nearly all accepted the personal immortality of the soul. The general Catholic discipline of society, such as property, indissoluble monogamous marriage, and the rest was still taken for granted.
For more than a century the growing division appeared as a contrast between Catholic tradition and what was called “Protestantism” in its various forms, the latter presenting bodies of doctrine chosen out of Catholicism, but less than the total of Catholic doctrine and discipline. The new selections produced, of course, a harvest of social results more tangible and concrete than the abstract differences in dogma and formula, and there arose a Protestant culture of the North side by side with the remaining Catholic culture of the South. The geographical division was purely accidental. Nothing could be more Catholic than the Irish of Donegal, nor more Protestant than the Huguenots of Nîmes, and the living centre of Protestantism was rather in southern France than in any other one region of the West.
But to this there succeeded another phase which, again, was not as logical as it should have been: a respectable development called “rationalism,” which arose in France and gradually permeated Europe. Its highest moment of expression was the middle of the eighteenth century, its greatest pen that of Voltaire, and perhaps its clearest intelligence that of Diderot.
This short-lived but attractive philosophy reduced its main dogmas, or postulates, to as small a number as possible, and proposed that nothing should be accepted save upon the criteria admissible by all sane men: particularly the criteria of the senses and common experience. It still tended to preserve a certain small but fundamental proportion of Catholic dogma; but it did so on the plea that such dogma was (as it imagined) universal to the human race, or at least to all sane men. Most of its adherents—not all of them—postulated one, personal, creative God, the sustainer of the universe. Of the Catholic discipline they accepted property as a moral right, and its twin institution of indissoluble monogamous marriage as a necessary thing in society, though they were perfectly ready to discuss these and any other disciplines.
Undoubtedly the underlying conception common to the rationalists was this, that there is a certain knowledge of reality to be obtained through the reason dealing with the senses and experience common to all men, and only what can be so obtained is to be affirmed as true. What could not be so obtained is to be rejected as doubtful or false. But while this was their underlying conception, they could not shake off a considerable body of their Catholic past.
This rationalism rejected the miraculous in every form, and even the unusual. It began to substitute the document for tradition in history, it proceeded to a strict and most
