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134 BOOK REVIEWS 19~6, R. H. Tawney remarked that " the true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx." Professor Worland now invites us to consider the proposition that the true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the theory of New Welfare Economics, and that the last of the schoolmen is, perhaps, J. R. Hicks. There must be a moral here somewhere-especially for those who consider the doctrines of Aquinas to be a closed and barren system! Qui potest capere capiat. GABRIEL P. BoWE, 0. P. Aquinas Institute River Forest, !Uinois Ethique Generale. By Joseph de Finance, S. J. Rome: Presses de l'Universite Gregorienne, 1967. Price 3,000 Lire. Ethique Generale is a textbook, the author's own translation into French of a previous Latin edition which itself was the fruit of his teaching experience at the Gregorian University in Rome. This alone could easily discourage a suspicious and, to the scholastic form of thought, unsympathetic reader from taking the pains to read some four hundred and forty pages of familiar arguments, names and references. Such at first was the feeling of this reviewer It persisted almost to the end of the first part of the book, entitled Moral l'alue. This part is devoted to an analysis of the great ethical systems of the past with the usual prominence given to Kant and the Utilitarians. Such an initial feeling, however, proved to be a false anticipation. Although less conspicuous on the surface, other more recent and still influential ethical currents such as marxism, logical positivism and existentialism are, for the size of the textbook, adequately and critically examined. It is from this analysis also that there gradually emerges the author's central preoccupation: a critical investigation into what constitutes the moral value and obligation to which the universal human consciousness gives an historically unintermittent testimony. The second and the third parts of the book, entitled respectively Moral Order and Beatitude and Morality, complete this investigation and, predictably enough, find the answer to moral value and obligation in God. Fr. de Finance follows the philosophy of Saint Thomas and endorses his position on all traditionally controversial issues, such as the primacy of the intellect, rational foundation of the law, immutability of the divine will, impossibility of morally indifferent acts in the individual, etc. But he intentionally departs from the formal structure of the Prima Secundae and explains his reasons. Philosophy, he writes quoting Saint Thomas, is unlike theology. It BOOK REVIEWS 435 studies the creatures in themselves and from them it progresses toward the knowledge of God. Thus, continues the author, " our method will be first analytical and inductive. It will begin with the data of moral conscience and through interpreting them and revealing their ultimate meaning it will reach the principles which will make deduction possible (p. ~5) ." By ending with the chapter on Beatitude rather than beginning with it, Ethique Generale symbolically admits that it is only an introduction to moral theology which alone can give a satisfactory answer to man's moral query. Such is the author's conclusion and the fact that Saint Thomas himself commented upon but never wrote an ethics seems to support it. This, however, raises some important questions in regard to both the relationship of ethics to moral theology and the nature of ethics as a science and academic discipline in the present structure of our curricula. Thus, if ethics is only a philosophical introduction to moral theology without ever reaching any scientific conclusions of its own, its position among the sciences becomes shaken, if not, indeed, untenable. In view of this, it is as dangerous to make ethics a department of moral theology as to make it a department of psychology or history of philosophy. In each case the assumption would be that there is no rationally objective evidence as to what is morally good and evil besides the evidence supplied by other sciences or a religious system. A moral dialogue on a purely human and rational level would become impossible and moral scepticism inescapable. The author, of course, makes no such suggestions, nor does...

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