An outrage to the senses
From the writings of Jacques Maritain; on the philosophical roots of modernism and the violation of reason
Three main symptoms of the disease inflicting the mind at the present day down to its very roots may be discerned at the point of evolution which speculation has reached since the great changes inaugurated by the Cartesian reform.
The mind imagines that it is giving proof of its own native strength by denying and rejecting as science first theology and then metaphysics; by abandoning any attempt to know the primary Cause and immaterial realities; by cultivating a more or less refined doubt which is an outrage both to the perception of the senses and the principles of reason, that is to say the very things on which all our knowledge depends. Such a presumptuous collapse of human knowledge may be described in one word: agnosticism.
The mind at the same time refuses to recognise the rights of primary truth and repudiates the natural order, considering it impossible — and such a denial is a blow at al the interior life of grace. That may be described in a word as naturalism.
Lastly, the mind allows itself to be deceived by the mirage of a mythical conception of human nature, which attributes to that nature conditions peculiar to pure spirit, assumes that nature to be in each of us as perfect and complete as the angelic nature in the angel and therefore claims for us, as being in justice our due, along with complete domination over nature, the superior autonomy, the full self-sufficiency, the autocracy appropriate to pure forms. That may be described as individualism although angelism would better describe it.
It is worth noting that the origin of individualism is found in the Cartesian confusion between substance of whatever sort and the angelic monad.
These three errors which attack the triple root of our life — rational, religious and moral, are before us today, sparkling, oppressive, ubiquitous. Everybody sees and feels them, because their sharp unsparing point has passed from the mind into the very flesh of humanity.
Let it be observed once more, it is the integrity of natural reason, the singleness of the eye of the mind, to adapt the expression in the Gospel, the fundamental rectitude of common sense which is outraged by such errors. What a strange fate has befallen rationalism! Men emancipated themselves from all control to conquer the universe and reduce all things to the level of reason. And in the end they come to abandon reality, no longer dare to make use of ideas to adhere to being, forbid themselves the knowledge of anything beyond the tangible fact and the phenomenon of consciousness, dissolve every object of speculation in a great fluid jelly called Becoming or Evolution, conceive themselves barbarous if they do not suspect every first principle and every rational demonstration of naiveté, substitute for the effort of speculation and logical discernment a sort of play of instinct, imagination, intuition, visceral emotions, have lost the courage to form a judgement.
Now it is important to realise that nothing below the level of the mind can remedy this disease, which affects the mind and derives from it; the mind alone can cure itself. If the mind is not saved, nothing will be saved.