quantity involved in the presence of the jugged hare that is the cause of the headache, or perchance on the day we ate of it the wind was in the east, or our stomach was already out of order, or some unwonted worry had befallen us. We, therefore, are still in the region of probabilities. Can we ever escape from them? We can do a good deal towards it by means of a third method, which is often extremely useful.

We resolve on a new experiment. We determine that we will try the effect of eating on one day a very small portion of jugged hare at our dinner, on another of having a good deal more, on another of making it the chief part of our dinner, and on another of having no other meat dish at all. The result is that we find that the severity of our headache is exactly or almost exactly proportioned to the amount of jugged hare eaten on the previous evening; a small quantity produced a very slight headache, a large quantity a more serious one, while on the morning following the day when we ate nothing else than hare we were so wretchedly ill that we were unable to attend to our ordinary business. Here is what is generally known as the method of concomitant variations.

Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation.

We are now approaching certainty, but there is nevertheless a possible element of uncertainty arising from the chance of the varying headache having been owing to circumstances which by a curious coincidence happened to produce it, with a severity which quite by accident was in proportion to the amount of jugged hare eaten for dinner. We are still in the region of probabilities, and we look round for a final method to try and assure the truth of our inference.

We have for years been studying the effects of various sorts of food and drink, as well as of walking, hard study, riding, boating, etc., on our constitution. Long experience has taught us the effect of each of these. Beef and mutton make us rather heavy the next morning, so does port wine; champagne makes us rise well contented with ourselves, plum pudding produces indigestion; walking, riding, cricket, and boating produce different kinds of bodily fatigue; severe mental labor, a curious feeling of oppression on the top of our head, and so on. On some particular morning we take stock of our bodily condition, and its various constituent symptoms. We are able to trace each and all of them to some familiar antecedent—all except the headache-we can trace in our present state of body the result of most of the circumstances of the previous day, the mental and bodily labor, the various kinds

of food, the amount of sleep, each has its familiar result-all save the jugged hare. Hence we subduct from the various results all those we can trace to known causes, and (neglecting minor details) we have left on the one hand the headache and on the other the jugged hare. Surely, then, this result unaccounted for must spring from the cause not yet taken into consideration. This method, which can often be employed with great advantage, is called the method of residues. Mr. Mill formulates it into the following law: Deduct from any phenomenon such part as is known by previous induction to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining antecedent.

Does this give us perfect physical certainty? Most decidedly not, if one take it by itself. Our attribution of effect a to cause A, of b to B, etc., is at best only a probable argument, and even if it is all correct, we cannot be sure that we have exhausted either consequents or possible antecedents. At most this method only contributes its share to the ever-increasing stream of probability which is gradually developing itself into the resistless river of practical certainty.

But when all these methods are united together, surely then we have certainty; not metaphysical certainty, but at least practical and physical certainty. Surely we can go beyond the mere tentative assertion of a hypothesis to the firm conviction of a wellgrounded law which certainly connects together the circumstances we are considering as cause and effect, or at least as in some way connected together by a final and stable law of causation.

Here we enter on a wider topic which would be out of place in the present paper. To those who still hold to a priori truths, to the school of Aristotle and St. Thomas, there opens out an endless vista of causes and effects, descending from God, the first cause, to every detail of His works, each connected together by a law which He has decreed, but which He may at any time set aside at His good pleasure, and which He has set aside from time to time by what we call a miracle.

But to the modern school of sensationalists, to Mill and Bain, cause and effect are words which have no meaning. Cause is but an invariable, unconditional antecedent, and effect an invariable, unconditional consequent. In them, if they were logical, there would be no certainty about the future, for what possible reason is there why it should resemble the past? Because it has always done so? The very supposition is a contradiction in terms, for the future is still unborn. All that experience has taught them is that one portion of the past has hitherto resembled another, that there has always been an unbroken uniformity of succession in the series

of antecedents and consequents. But of the future as such we never have had and never can have any experience, and our conjectures respecting it are, if we logically follow to their conclusions the theories of Mr. Mill and his school, the merest guess-work, an arrow shot into the air without any sort of ground for believing that it will hit the mark.

Our conclusion, therefore, is that these methods are a most valuable contribution, if not to logic, strictly so called, yet to the course of human discovery and scientific research. The Catholic philosopher learns from Aristotle and St. Thomas the a priori law, one of the first principles of all knowledge, that every effect must have a cause. He knows that this law extends not merely to effects following as particular applications of some a priori law which becomes known to us as soon as a single instance of it is presented before us and grasped by our intelligence, as in the case of the deductions and inferences of mathematics, but also to effects following from what is also rightly called a law, inasmuch as it is a general principle, under which a vast number of particulars are ranged, but is nevertheless arrived at by generalization from a vast number of particular instances. In the one case, as in the other, the universal law of causation holds. In the one case cause is joined to effect in virtue of the inner nature of things; in the other simply because the will of God has so disposed the arrangements of the universe that He has created. In the one case experience makes known to us a law which is already imprinted on our intelligence; in the other experience makes known to us a law which is stamped upon the world outside, but only becomes a part of our mental furniture when we have carefully weighed and sifted a number of individual instances of its operation. In the one case the methods of induction are rarely, if ever, of any practical use; in the other they are simply invaluable.

We are now in a position to assign their true place to the inductive methods of which Bacon was the harbinger and Mr. John Stuart Mill and his school the prophets and apostles.

I. They certainly can claim a place in material logic, even if not in formal. To ignore them and to hurry over material induction with a passing remark that it must be virtually complete, ie., must include a number of instances sufficient to afford a reasonable basis of certitude, is scarcely prudent in the face of the development of scientific research. Catholics would not be so easily taken in by the hasty generalizations of the modern scientist if they had the use of these methods and the kind of certainty to be derived from them at their fingers' ends. It is no use to allege the authority of Aristotle and St. Thomas in disparagement of them. If Aristotle and St. Thomas had lived in the present day they would have

taken the lead in regulating the methods of scientific research, just as in their own day they laid down the principles of deductive argument. The eager questioning of nature was in their day a thing unheard of, and any elaborate setting forth of the methods to be pursued was then superfluous and unnecessary.

2. These inductive methods can never give us absolute certainty, but they can give us physical certainty. They cannot give us absolute certainty because the laws they reveal to us are reversible at the will of their maker; they can give us physical certainty for the simple reason that the human mind is so constructed as to be able to test without any reasonable doubt, on a combination of arguments of which it may be that no single and individual one is sufficient to carry conviction to the mind of a reasonable man, but a number of them combined is enough and more than enough to make him perfectly sure of the conclusion to which they one and all concurrently point.

3. We must always be on our guard against allowing ourselves to be persuaded into a conviction of the truth of some general hypothesis when the concurrent evidence is not sufficient of itself to produce conviction. We must remember Aristotle's admirable. distinction between deduction and induction, that the one is more forcible, the other more persuasive and clear, and within the reach of ordinary men.

4. We have too often seen the intellectual convictions of scientific men shaken by the brilliant guesses which induction suggests, and which they regarded as justifying them in discarding the belief that they had previously held to be true. Very slow and cautious. should we be in allowing any law arrived at by a process of pure induction to set aside any conviction that seems to be based upon a higher and more certain mode of argument. Of course there are occasional instances, as the so-often quoted case of Galileo; but for one such instance there have been hundreds in which some premature hypothesis has been allowed to weaken the grasp on a priori truth, to be in its turn discarded for some equally premature successor, sitting in its turn for a brief period on the usurped throne of truth.

THE BATTLE WITH ANTICHRIST IN FRANCE.

THE

HE year '88 is passing slowly away in "The Land of the Lilies," and the centenary of '89 approaches, bringing with it the dread memories of the great French Revolution. Already the men who, in France, consider themselves to be the heirs of the "Principles of 1789,' are commemorating, one after the other, the chief events which, in 1788, startled all Europe, as the first throes of an earthquake give warning of some mighty and far-spreading upheaval. Those, on the contrary, whose deepest convictions lead them to uphold and defend the ancient Christian order of society, assailed and partly destroyed by the Revolution, are roused into extraordinary activity and united effort to protect the institutions and doctrines which they hold to be most sacred and most dear. They have, in truth, great need of perfect union and concerted action. For ANTICHRIST is abroad in France, marshalling his forces under his own flag, held boldly on high in sight of the nations. The battle-cry of his soldiers-a countless host, and bent this time on completing their work of destruction-is directed against GOD AND HIS CHRIST. The pass-word of Voltaire to his followers a century ago, Ecrasez l'Infâme, has now become Ni Dieu ni Maître-NO GOD, NO MASTER!

The conflict has been going on for some time between the two hosts. The successive measures taken by the various administrations under the new Republic, ever since the downfall of Marshal MacMahon and the election to the presidency of M. Grévy, have been so many victories of Antichrist, all carrying forward the grand purpose of "laicizing," that is, of DECHRISTIANIZING, in France, not only the entire field of education, but every department of public charity and beneficence, of excluding all religious emblems, practices and influences from every establishment under Government control; hospitals, prisons, the army and the navy, counting at the present moment nearly two millions of men in active or occasional service.

After all that has been effectually done in France toward the accomplishment of this grand scheme of "dechristianizing" the nation, it will be natural to describe what those in power are planning further to do to make their work complete; this will place before the reader the plan of campaign marked out for the antiChristian forces during the decisive year 1889. We shall then review some at least of the forces which are bravely battling for