obscured thought and masqueraded under the fine-sounding name of idealism. unhappy Idealism, how many intellectual follies have been committed in thy name! Theosophy, the speculations of the Kabala, occultism, magic, spiritualism, all the mystic ravings of the Neo-Platonists and Neo-Pythagoreans, the most antiquated of theories, debris of every kind, heaped haphazard on the foundation of the speculations of the ages — all these have returned to favour in defiance of the dictates of logic and common sense. Balance and the sense of direction have to a certain extent been lost, the fight of intelligence quenched, and man gropes in the gloom of wild inspirations, direct intuitions, and mysterious miracles in the search for some new truth which shall satisfy the inmost needs of the human mind.
2. Intellectualism and Anti-Intellectualism in the History of Philosophy. — The reaction from pure intellectualism, which reached its zenith towards the end of the last century, is nothing new in the history of philosophy, but a phenomenon which recurs whenever thought indulges in exaggerated rationalism. In Greece the splendid affirmation of the concept against the subjectivism of the Sophists and the intellectualism which had carried all before it from Socrates to Aristotle was followed by the sceptical dissolution which ended in the ravings of the mystics of Alexandria; while the glow of Christian sentiment came to fill the void left by a cold intellectualism in minds confused by the contradictory formulas of the various systems and the quibbles of destructive dialectic. All through the Middle Ages we see this antithesis of mystic faith and love, which breaks out from time to time with fresh force in protest against the excesses of rationalism: the paradoxical “Credo quia absurdum” of Tertullian stands in opposition to the bold assertions of the gnostics; the “Amo ut intelligam” of S. Bernard and the Victorines marks the reaction of feeling from the intemperate dialectic of Abelard’s “Intelligo ut credam”;
