A child playing with wooden bricks will happily knock over his construction and then earnestly and hastily build up another tottering house that is to last no longer than its predecessor. At present we are like the child feverishly trying to pick up the bits, even while they are still falling, to set to work on some new arrangement of the same material. Society must receive all our attention. It has fallen to pieces and so with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men we are trying to put it together again.

Sir William Beveridge dominates the playroom of the rebuilders and his Report presents the most comprehensive of all the hundreds of plans for the next tottering structure. But the materials are much the same as before only a little more pronounced in their shape. Praise is due to the Report as well as to its author for its high aims as well as for the knowledge and industry that has given it birth. Social security for the whole nation, freedom from want and disease, employment for all, to bring such blessings within reach of each citizen in the Kingdom explains the almost unanimous acclamation it has received. For many years now the Popes have been proposing a new way of life that will bring security for low as well as high.

It is probable that the most serious obstacle in the way of a rapprochement between Thomism and much ‘modern thought’ is the widespread misgiving that Thomism ignores or rejects ‘value-perception’ and ‘value-experience.’ This misgiving is impressive both to the layman and to the professional philosopher. To the layman, because it is supposed that the embracing of the principles of a system so frigidly rational and so rigidly scientific involves a repudiation of the ‘appreciative,’ ‘humanistic’ attitude to life, and with it the denial of the validity of one’s most cherished and intimate personal experience. To the philosopher, because, in the words of Professor Pringle-Pattison, ‘At the present time philosophy is carried on more explicitly in terms of value than at any previous time.’

That ‘experience,’ ‘value-perception,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘instinct,’ ‘real’ or ‘affective’ knowledge—call them what you will—have in great measure come to claim the place which of old was ascribed to logical reasoning is a commonplace which calls for no proof. Even among those whom the Romanticist revolt from reason has not led to an admitted abandonment of logical, hard-headed thinking, there has come about a divorce of ‘experience’ from ‘thought’ whose effects can be scarcely less disastrous. ‘Description’ and ‘appreciation’ come to be regarded, not merely as distinct and independent ways of approach to the same reality, but as terminating in diverse realities.

That branch of the science of psychology, which perhaps is the most important branch, Medical Psychology, has without doubt become a permanent addition to Medicine.

One Catholic psychiatrist has called this contribution towards the Art and Practice of medicine ‘the other half of medicine,’ and the medical faculty would be inclined to endorse this opinion. Most of the teaching hospitals have now a special department in charge of a psychiatrist who acts as lecturer in psychological medicine as Well as being consultant to ‘out patients’ for functional nervous disorders.

Before the war the Institute of Medical Psychology, besides teaching and training an ever increasing number of doctors who wished to specialise in this subject, gave treatment to 14,986 new patients in the twenty-one years of its existence. The number of doctors who specialise in psychological medicine is now very large, and in this war all branches of the services have special psychiatric hospitals, where service patients are given treatment. This brief summary of the activities of psychological medicine should be sufficient guarantee that the medical profession has given an ‘imprimatur’ to what was perhaps considered at one time to be the happy hunting ground for cranks, faddists, and even charletans.

Man is a creature rooted in earth and drawing his breath from heaven. Apart from the truism that nature itself and every created thing comes from God, there is a sense in which we may make a legitimate distinction between the origins of man’s bodily and spiritual parts, regarding the one as from nature, the other from God. This union and integration of the corporal and spiritual in one creature is man’s unique distinction; and in most cases the normal, uninhibited man is emotionally aware of his kinship with the earth and with God. Throughout history this feeling of kinship has expressed itself in the two activities most perfectly characteristic of humanity, namely agriculture and religion. All civilisations have tended to approximate to the rural-religious pattern in some form or other until the last few centuries in the West and very recently in the Far East. Since the rural-religious life is essentially normal to man and satisfies the supreme appetitions of his being, it follows that he can only achieve true happiness and integration when his relation to nature and God is harmoniously satisfied. It does not, of course, follow that rural-religious societies will be necessarily happy or integrated : original sin is not so easily overcome; but it does follow inexorably that if men apostatise from nature and God they will inevitably be unhappy and disintegrated.

In the winter of 1920-21 there was founded in Vienna the Association known as Logos. It was an Association or club of members of the University who sought to solve their problems and difficulties by discussion and research. There were under-graduates and graduates, scholars and professors, men and women of the learned professions : historians, scientists, doctors, lawyer, metaphysicians, linguists, social-philosophers and economists. Those were days of hardship and misery in Austria. The dismemberment of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, the breakdown of a world built five centuries before, the reversal of age-old traditions, poverty and unemployment, anti-religious movements and modern materialistic-rationalistic trends of thought, brought new social and individual needs and innumerable personal problems, and led a few people to gather together for discussion. They soon realised that only faith could provide a firm basis for their proceedings and that authoritative guidance on theological matters was essential. They, therefore, approached the Jesuit Fathers in Vienna and asked for the appointment of a Father to act as spiritual adviser at their meetings. This request was granted, and after a year’s intensive work by some twenty laymen of different learned professions of science and arts and after many experiments a certain definite method was tested and accepted and proved to be perfectly workable.