4] 
the sum total of human knowledge, fearless enough to welcome 
them all, knowing that fact can never contradict fact and that 
truth can never be in antagonism to truth; and it must be elastic 
enough to meet the result of philosophic research, holding on to 
what is, pressing on to what is to come. It must be, in the third 
place, a reflection of all those elements which in the development 
of thought persist because true. 
We have men around us building up grand systems of philosophy 
and those systems die one after another, and yet, as the scientist 
shows us to-day the structure of the beings that lived ages and ages 
ago and left a substratum of fact after them, so these systems of 
thought that come and goand die leave something after them. No 
system of thought is totally false, though few systems of thought 
can claim to be totally true. And so our system of philosophy 
must be able to hold on to all that is true, no matter where it comes 
from, ta hold on to the persistent, to hold on to that which is 
eternal because it is true. : 
May I be permitted in conclusion to ask your attention to what 
some may consider a singular fact in the world of thought at the 
close of the nineteenth century. Let me ask your attention to that 
grand old man whom we Catholics I think have a right to be proud 
of, Leo XIII, who on the one hand calls the world again to study 
the old scholastic philosophy, and, on the other hand, endows out 
of his own means astronomical observatories and laboratories of 
physics and of chemistry. That man is convinced that there is in 
that old philosophy a body of principles that are the truth, a body 
of principles that therefore are everlasting, a body of principles 
that therefore can guide science as well at the end of the nineteenth 
century as they did in the middle of the thirteenth. He shows 
that that philosophy is not a fossil, but a system of living principles 
ready to take in all that the scalpel, the retort and the lens can 
ever show us, and to teach all the wondrous progress of the science 
of the future how it is to weave itself into the great harmony of 
truth and is yet to shed its refulgence on the world. He shows us 
that it is possible for a system devised by Aristotle and developed 
by Aquinas to receive yet further development, and to answer yet 
or to help mankind to answer all the mighty problems in nature and 
above it that press upon the mind of man. 
Shall not America do something towards helping the world to 
PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXII. 143. F. PRINTED NOV. 22, 1893. 
