God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ
crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the
world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had
made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set
for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine
in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain
curiosity to the study of alien things."

Precisely: and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan
philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which
followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and
Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James. The jealously intellectual
philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and
mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such
enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but
"the falsehoods of their own imaginings" of which Hugh of St. Victor
speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and
are losing themselves in the desert they have made.

Meanwhile they have played their part in shaping the destinies of the
world, and it was an ill part, if we may judge from the results that
showed themselves in the events that have been recorded between the year
1800 and the present moment. Just what this influence was in determining
the nature of society, of industrial civilization and of the political
organism I shall try to indicate in some of the following lectures, but
apart from these concrete happenings, this influence was, I am
persuaded, most disastrous in its bearing on human character. Neither
wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the
inherent tendencies of race--the most powerful of all--can avail against