520 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



social principle it must necessarily be incarnated in a social 

 organisation which is strongly integrated, strongly coherent, 

 capable of permeating society with its influence. The vague 

 idealism which is based on individual judgment is not a social 

 principle ; it is a rational principle, which can have no power to 

 effect social cohesion. And the only organisation which answers 

 to these conditions ; the only organisation in which there has not 

 been proclaimed a speculative liberty, the basis of which it is 

 impossible to establish ; the only organisation which responds 

 in a suf&cient measure to the conditions of universality and 

 stabihty and integration ; the only organisation which is capable, 

 by means of its great traditions, of linking the individual with 

 society in the past, the present, and the future ; the only organisa- 

 tion which is able, by means of its conditions of universality, 

 stabiUty, and integration, to confer adequate value on the life 

 of the individual, and adequate sanction on his acts — in a word, 

 the only organisation capaWe of constituting a spiritual organisa- 

 tion of idealistic and supra-rational principles adequate to the 

 needs of Western civilisation — is the Catholic Church. Thus, 

 from the sociological point of view, the Catholic Church must be 

 considered as a factor of fundamental importance. 



Having arrived at this conclusion, we must, at the risk of 

 appearing to repeat ourselves, go back to the conclusion arrived 

 at ia the last chapter : the conclusion, namely, that science, 

 while it constitutes one of the noblest expressions of the ex- 

 pansion of the human intellect, is incapable, nevertheless, of 

 completely satisfying the need for expansion. Science, while 

 it stimulates the need for expansion, brings us at every turn 

 to a frontier which we are unable to cross ; and the Unknowable 

 stands as a perpetual barrier which checks all further efEort, 

 and contemplates, as if in irony, our vain endeavours to break 

 it down. But, if nothing is more capable than science of showing 

 us what are the limits of the human intellect, and how puny 



