in harmony with Christian teaching. Thus the scholastic philosophy is fundamentally the philosophy of Aristotle, who is always spoken of by the schoolmen as ‘the philosopher,’ just as St. Paul is called ‘the Apostle.’
To logic and metaphysics is usually joined a treatise on natural ethics, founded on the Nicomachean ethics. It deals with the abstract conceptions of right and duty, virtue and vice, law and conscience; discusses the various theories of moral obligation; expounds and enforces the various duties which arise from the relations of individual, social, and international life. Since no appeal to revelation is admitted in it, the treatise goes by the name of natural ethics to distinguish it from the science of moral theology, which covers the same ground in the light of revelation and authority.
One of the principal defects of the course of philosophy which is thus given to clerical students is its narrow exclusivism. That their own philosophical system is plausible, strongly and cleverly constructed, is what one would expect from the vast number of keen intellects that have contributed to its elaboration; but every manual from which it is taught and every professor carefully excludes, or only gives a most inaccurate version of, rival philosophies. At Cambridge, the programme of philosophical authors is so delightfully impartial that few students find themselves in possession of definite philosophical views after reading
