456 AMBROSE J. MCNICHOLL 



notion of science and philosophy, the Greek heritage which he 

 condemned as dominated by mathematics, and the typically 

 Greek notion of the universe as a cosmos. It is blasphemous, 

 he held, to attempt to unite faith and reason; the medieval 

 synthesis succeeded only in degrading faith. Ethics, cultivated 

 as a science, is but self-deception, an excuse to avoid having to 

 make decisions; the only reliable conclusions are those of pas- 

 sion. Philosophy, to be worthy of the name, cannot be the 

 abstract and purely academic speculation of the university pro- 

 fessor, but a personal thinking that is also a commitment. Man 

 must learn to see himself, not as a substance, but as a series of 

 possibilities, a chain of acts, a succession of decisions, which 

 keep one on the dizzy heights of freedom. The way to truth is 

 not that of science, or of airy speculation, but the way of sub- 

 jectivity, which involves grasping oneself as a unique indi- 

 vidual, with a unique situation and destiny, and arriving at 

 one's own truth, which is truth for the whole man who, far 

 more than intellect, is affectivity and will.*' 



One may not, of course, take Kierkegaard as representative 

 of nineteenth century thinking, although he undoubtedly 

 brought clearly to light many of the motives which, perhaps 

 unconsciously, did influence the thought of many people. His 

 protest against the subjection of man to mechanism, implying 

 the degradation of the human person to the status of a mere 

 function in a society more and more dominated by science, was 

 to become a leading theme in the writings of the later Existen- 

 tialists. This revolt against scientism was soon to be strength- 

 ened by a crisis within science itself, beginning with the French 

 school of the critique of science — Cournot, Meyerson, Poincare 

 — which tended to show that scientific knowledge is largely 

 conventional, with a validity that is mainly statistical, so that 

 it cannot claim more than probability. The rise of the new 

 mathematics, such as the non-Euclidian geometries of Riemann 

 and Lobachevsky, together with the studies of Frege and 



*Cf. W. Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: 

 Meridian, 1958), pp. 14-18. 



