66 PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM n 



capable of performing when driven into a corner ; 

 or science must throw down its arms in despair, 

 and commit suicide, either by the admission that 

 the universe is, after all, irrational, inasmuch as 

 that which is truth in one corner of it is absurdity 

 in another, or by a declaration of incompetency. 



In the middle ages, the labours of those great 

 men who endeavoured to reconcile the system of 

 thought which started from the data of pure 

 reason, with that which started from the data of 

 Roman theology, produced the system of thought 

 which is known as scholastic philosophy ; the 

 alternative of surrender and suicide is exemplified 

 by Avicenna and his followers when they declared 

 that that which is true in theology may be false 

 in philosophy, and vice versd ; and by Sanchez 

 in his famous defence of the thesis " Quod nil 

 scitur" 



To those who deny the validity of one of the 

 primary assumptions of the disputants who 

 decline, on the ground of the utter insufficiency of 

 the evidence, to put faith in the reality of that 

 other world, the geography and the inhabitants of 

 which are so confidently described in the so-called x 

 Christianity of Catholicism the long and bitter 

 contest, which engaged the best intellects for so 



1 I say "so-called" not by way of offence, but as a protest 

 against the monstrous assumption that Catholic Christianity is 

 explicitly or implicitly contained in any trustworthy record of 

 the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. 



