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VIII. NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE. RECENT REVOLUTIONS IN JESUIT PHILOSOPHY. [The following communication is from the hand of one who is believed to be in a position to speak as he does concerning the events in question. Names of persons and places are withheld, but can be supplied. EDITOR.] It is by no means uninteresting to study, with the eye of an impartial outsider, the vicissitudes undergone by the philosophical doctrines of the Jesuits during the present century, that is, since the bull ' Solicitudo omnium Ecc/esiarum' undid, in 1814, what the bull ' Dominm ac Redemptor Noster' had done forty years before. Two important questions have caused, during this period, many internal dissensions among them : one, concern- ing the origin of ideas ; and the other relative to the ultimate constituents of matter. Both have been finally more or less decided ; not indeed in themselves, but only as to the doctrine that professors belonging to the Society are exclusively bound to maintain. I propose to set down a few details about the circumstances under which these decisions took place, in so far as they are known to me either personally or by information received from members of the Society. As in the Roman Catholic Church there are certain religious dogmas that every member of that Church is bound to believe, so among the Jesuits there are certain philosophical doctrines that every professor is bound to teach. This of course supposes a considerable difference between these two obligations, both in themselves and relatively to those who are bound by them. Still, when we reflect upon the spirit of obedience and discipline so carefully fostered amongst the Jesuits, we must not wonder if we find that an order for professors to teach such and such doctrines obtains in a few years the result intended, viz., that the great majority of Jesuit students un- hesitatingly reject the contrary opinions as not worth a moment's considera- tion, unless for the purpose of refuting them. And indeed, besides the higher motive of obedience which is the veryjlife of the Order, and which, as St. Ignatius says in his famous Letter on Obedience, ought as far as possible to direct the mind as well as the will, there is also a lower motive, more closely resembling ambition. I do not speak of that esprit de corps that inclines most people to ' home ' opinions which makes Englishmen empiri- cal psychologists and Frenchmen Cartesians ; though this has certainly its effect upon most minds. But every clever student of philosophy among the Jesuits knows that, should he be one day chosen as professor, he will have to teach in such and such a manner, determined beforehand. True, he may teach it as he chooses : he may affirm the absurdity of the contrary opinion, or state that it is not in accordance with facts or dogmas, or set it down as improbable, or merely as less probable ; he is even free to attribute proba- bility to the position he maintains, without saying anything at all about the other. Moderation, however, is a rare phenomenon, and though the ' absurdissiimu ineptise,' the ' evidentissime evidens,' the 'deliramenta,' the recommendations to take a dose of hellebore, &c., so frequently found in Father Liberatore's (and others') text-books, are very generally laughed at by both students and professors, it would not be hard to name a professor who at a certain college in France (in 1877-1878) got in hot water for being too outspoken in favour of Descartes. It is true that this was not the only cause of his unpopularity amongst the students. 30