Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES Medieval Humanism. By GERALD G. WALsH. (The Christendom Series.) New York: Macmillan, 194~. Pp. 103. $1.00. The Catholic Revival in England. By John J. O'Connor. (The Christendom Series.) New York: Macmillan, 194~. Pp. 10~. $1.00. These two additions to The Christendom Series point to an important contribution that the Series can make to general Catholic culture in America. The more one becomes acquainted with the achievements and past greatness of the institution to which one belongs, the more one's pride in that institution grows. Catholics are, perhaps, sufficiently aware of what the Church is doing today; but their knowledge of its past is rather sketchy. They may even feel that the Catholic past requires more defense than praise. The two books mentioned here are capable of removing that feeling of inferiority. Father Walsh has shown the growth of a real humanism during the middle ages. His thesis is that mediaeval Christianity attained a synthesis (at least in many of its great men) in which were combined a Hellenic passion for truth, a Roman emphasis on Law, a Christian hunger for divine life, Teutonic force, and Celtic fancy. As examples he uses Thomas Aquinas and Dante. The short bibliography added by Dr. Walsh forces upon our attention the fact that there are not great scholarly works on the middle ages by Catholic scholars. Mr. O'Connor's work presents the facts surrounding the amazing revival of the Catholic Church in England from 1770 to 189~, during which period the Catholic population rose from sixty thousand to two million. The Methodology of Pierre Duhem. By ARMAND LowiNGER. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Pp. 184, with indices. $~.~5. Pierre Duhem was one of the scientists-Mach, Poincare, LeRoy were others-who subjected the scientific method to a rigorous scrutiny and elaborated therefrom a philosophy of science. The majority of his writings, including all those dealing with this methodological phase of his thought, remain without English translation. Dr. Lowinger has done the service of summarizing Duhem's La Theorie physique in clear, concise terms with a liberal helping of the original illustrative material. Scholastics acknowledge a debt to Duhem in opening the eyes of his contemporaries to the existence of medieval thought. However, in his preoccupation with the scientific foreshadowings of Buridan and Dominic Soto, he failed to appreciate the pertinence of the philosophia perennis to his problem; in fact, he regarded St. Thomas as a mere compiler. Rather he became a phenomenalistic positivist, denying ontologie validity to any scientific theory going beyond the observable facts. Conceiving methodology in the spirit of Dewey's operationalism, as "essentially a description of the scientific procedure," Dr. Lowinger criticizes Duhem's analysis as contradicted by the current situation of professional science. A more profound evaluation radicated in a deeper metaphysic is to be had in the works of Maritain, particularly in The Degrees of Knowledge. 769 ...