of no philosophical training could have failed to perceive them. Here it
is that the self-taught man comes to grief and often misses the mere
truisms of traditional teaching.

Doubtless ecclesiastical philosophy and theology was then more than ever
painfully fossilized, and altogether lifeless and out of sympathy with
the spirit of the age. It needed to be quickened, adapted and applied to
modern exigencies. The undue intrusion of metaphysics into the domain of
positive knowledge needed checking; the value of _consensus communis_ as
a criterion required to be insisted on, defended, and exactly defined.
With characteristic impetuosity, De Lamennais, like Comte, must bundle
metaphysics out of doors altogether as a merely provisional but illusory
synthesis, necessary for the human intellect in its adolescence, but to
be discarded in its maturity; and thereupon he proceeds to erect his
system of Traditionalism mid-air, quite unconscious that in clearing
away metaphysics he has deprived the structure of its only possible
foundation. But this is the man all over. Because there is a truth in
Traditionalism, therefore, it is the whole and only truth; because
metaphysics alone can do little, it is therefore unnecessary and
worthless. Had he spent but a fraction of the time and trouble he gave
to the elaboration of his own system, in a liberal and critical study of
that which he desired to supersede, his genius might have accomplished a
work for the Church which is still halting badly on its way to
perfection. One feels something like anger in contemplating such
hot-headed zeal standing continually in its own light, and frustrating
with perverse ingenuity the very end which it was most desirous to
realize. For no one can deny that from his first conversion to his
unhappy death De Lamennais was dominated by the highest and noblest and
most unselfish motives; that he was a man of absolute sincerity of
purpose.