His rival, Dr. Ward, also a prominent figure of the great Oxford movement, is the very antithesis of Newman. Newman used to speak contemptuously of the ‘dry bones’ of Ward’s logic, and evidently considered that his own works clothed them and made them more attractive. Ward was a keen dialectician, a subtle metaphysician, and a vigorous writer; his ‘Philosophy of Theism,’ a collection of essays, is the best English defence of the scholastic philosophy. Unfortunately he was not a man of ascetical temperament, and did not penetrate deeper than he could help into the regions of abstract thought. J. S. Mill was leading him to the critical points of the system in a famous controversy which closed prematurely by Mill’s death.
Dr. Mivart is the most influential living writer on the Roman Catholic side, and the most competent to discuss those great problems, ‘ever ancient and ever new,’ in the light in which they present themselves to the actual generation. Issuing, as he did, from the Darwinian school, it is but natural to expect from him a breadth of view and a seriousness of treatment which happily differentiate his works from those of the usual clerical apologists. Dr. Mivart, however, is not a metaphysician, hence his psychological criticism of Darwinism contents itself with the enumeration of striking points of difference between animal and human faculties which a deeper analysis glimpses, at least, the possibility of harmonising; and this is the
