MOD H KN ISM AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY. 



supplemented by the Hon. MissPetre in the Life published by 

 her shortly after Tyrrell's death. In 1878 Tyrrell matriculated 

 at Trinity College, Dublin, and began about the same time to 

 attend surreptitiously Mass atlioman churches. In the follow- 

 ing year he came to London, where he became less and less 

 attached to Anglicanism and was at length received into the 

 Roman Communion, but, as he says, "Personal relation of the 

 whole matter to God was then, as now, very weakly conceived 

 and felt." 



He entered the noviciate of the Society of Jesus in 1880, 

 and from that time until his dismissal in 1906 his critical and 

 somewhat irritable mind was almost in continuous conflict 

 with the principles of the Order. 



Tyrrell on Scholasticism. 



He was captivated at first with Scholasticism, or rather with 

 its great exponent, St. Thomas Aquinas, but he came finally to 

 see that " the realism it defends plays," as he says, "into the 

 hands of idealism." Yet, he adds, " it is perhaps not a more 

 gross thought-system than that which Christ had to use as the 

 vehicle of His revelation." Scholasticism was, at any rate, 

 the only philosophy of the Roman Church : " it was, in fact," 

 as he says, " Catholic philosophy by which our religion must 

 stand or fall," and "every other system is, therefore, non-Catho- 

 lic and heretical." 



He saw that it is " necessarily the most coherent of all 

 systems : every possible objection had been raised, and an answer 

 found for it in accordance with the general underlying assump- 

 tions. To question or criticize these last," he says, " is to put 

 one's self out of the pale of intelligence, and even of civility : 

 as Kant and the critical school have done." And he gradually 

 put himself outside this pale. 



Scholasticism, while borrowing much from Aristotle, was a 

 reaction against the view that the intellectual side of our nature 

 was not individual but of a universal character. The " unity of 

 the intellect " theory was regarded as a kind of Pantheism. It 

 was, in the view of Aquinas, an illegitimate deduction from the 

 philosophy of Aristotle. The active intellect could not be 

 regarded rightly as a manifestation of a universal mind — 

 as an attribute of a Cosmic Being or Existence. In the eyes of 

 the Schoolmen such a doctrine would destroy individual 

 personality and the root of morality. 



