464 AMBROSE J. MCNICHOLL 



engaged in lived experience; with a new method: a form of 

 description that will invite to reflection and awaken experience; 

 and a new aim: to bring man to a decisive option, by which he 

 may freely and with full responsibility accept himself and his 

 situation, and so begin to exist. 



If, as may appear to many, it is an exaggeration to claim 

 that this attitude is representative of modern man, one might 

 take as typical, between the extremes of Analysis and Existen- 

 tialism, of Physicalism and Phenomenology, the position of 

 Bergson, for whom the knowledge characteristic of the intellect 

 is deteraiinistic science, whereas reality, as creative becoming, 

 can be grasped only by intuition. He sees the history of philoso- 

 phy as a conflict between the Greek conception, which would 

 subordinate the flux of reality to the immobility of rigid ideas, 

 and the more human and vital attempts to pierce by way of 

 intuition to that duration which is the inner reality of things. 

 And we should not forget that in Heidegger Existentialism and 

 Phenomenology meet in an attempt to rejoin the insights of 

 the pre-Socratics in a doctrine of being which rests on an intui- 

 tion whose term is existence precisely as temporal. If philoso- 

 phy is still a science, it is, for such authors as these, a quite 

 different form of knowledge from that which Aristotle and his 

 followers have regarded as scientific. 



Tasks for Thomists 



It might seem, at first sight, that there is little in common 

 between the traditional notion of science and philosophy and 

 these modem conceptions; yet we can indicate several points 

 of contact between modern theories and the philosophia peren- 

 nis. If the attention of many philosophers today is drawn 

 towards the sphere of the pre-rational, this does not imply irra- 

 tionalism, for their aim is, particularly in the case of the Phe- 

 nomenologists, to discover meaning and rationality in that 

 neglected field of research. The notion of intentionality has 

 been re-introduced into the realm of consciousness, and norm- 

 ally this is recognised to imply that consciousness is open to- 

 wards being, thus freeing philosophy from the subjectivism that 



