A GNOSTICISM AND E VOL UTION. 269 



neither natural selection, nor struggle for life, nor 

 the influence of environment, nor other aliases of 

 it, will account for the logos within us. If any 

 philosopher can persuade himself, that the true and 

 well-ordered genera of nature are the results of me- 

 chanical causes, whatever name we may give them, 

 he moves in a world altogether different from my 

 own. To Plato, these genera were ideas; to the 

 peripatetics, they were words, or logoi; to both, 

 they were manifestations of thought." ' 



Sources of Agnosticism. 



One of the chief sources of the Agnosticism 

 now so rampant, is to be sought in the lamentable 

 ignorance of the fundamental principles of true 

 philosophy and theology everywhere manifest, and 

 especially in the productions of our modern scien- 

 tists and philosophers. And the only antidote for 

 agnostic, as well as atheistic teaching, is that scho- 

 lastic philosophy which contemporary thinkers ig- 

 nore, if they do not positively contemn ; for it alone 

 can clear up the fallacies which are constantly ad- 

 mitted in the name of philosophy, and which have 

 done so much to confuse thought and to make 

 sound ratiocination impossible. 



Another not unfrequent cause of error arises from 

 a false psychology, from confounding or identifying 

 a faculty imagination which is material, with a 

 faculty reason which is immaterial. Mind is made 

 a function of matter, and that which cannot be pic- 

 tured to the imagination is regarded as impossible of 



1 The Nineteenth Century, December, 1894. 



