XII.] TIIEOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. 



takes much interest in jurisprudence, or a prize-fighter who 

 is an acute metaphysician. Nay, more than this, a positive 

 distaste may grow up, which, in the intellectual order, may 

 amount to a spontaneous and unreasoning disbelief in that 

 which appears to be in opposition to the more familiar con- 

 cept, and this at all times. It is often and truly said, that 

 " past ages were preeminently credulous as compared with 

 our own, yet the difference is not so much in the amount of 

 the credulity, as in the direction which it takes." " 



Dr. Newman observes : " Any one study, of whatever 

 kind, exclusively pursued, deadens in the mind the interest, 

 nay, the perception of any other. Thus Cicero says that 

 Plato and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Isocrates, might have 

 respectively excelled in each other's province, but that 

 each was absorbed in his own. Specimens of this peculiar- 

 ity occur every day. You can hardly persuade some men 

 to talk about any thing but their own pursuit ; they refer the 

 whole world to their own centre, and measure all matters by 

 their own rule, like the fisherman in the drama, whose eu- 

 logy on his deceased lord was, ' He was so fond of fish.' " " 



The same author further says : * a " When any thing, 

 which comes before us, is very unlike wh#t we commonly 



service of a universal philosophy, and so turned into instruments of mis- 

 chief and distortion. That " we can know nothing but phenomena " 

 that " causation is simply constant priority " that " men are governed 

 invariably by their interests," are examples of rules allowable as domi- 

 nant hypotheses in physics or political economy, but exercising a deso- 

 lating tyranny when thrust on to the throne of universal empire. He 

 who seizes upon these and similar maxims, and carries them in triumph 

 on his banner, may boast of his escape from the uncertainties of meta- 

 physics, but is himself all the while the unconscious victim of their very 

 vulgarest deception." ("Essays," Second Series, A Plea for Philosophi- 

 cal Studies, p. 421.) 



37 Lecky's " History of Rationalism," voL i., p. 73. 



38 "Lectures on University Subjects," by J. H. Newman, D. D., p. 

 322. 



89 Loc. cit., p. 324. 



