"It is a great humiliation for me to admit that I was ever in a state
in which I doubted the actual validity of the testimony of my own
faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence. I
had begun my mental life in politics, and in a certain sense in
religion; but to my philosophical life I was yet unborn."

In the article on the "Workingman's Party," already quoted from,
Father Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to
lecture before the New York members of the party for several years,
goes on as follows:

"If it be asked why a man like Dr. Brownson, a born philosopher,
should have thus busied himself with the solution of the most
practical of problems by undertaking to abolish inequality among men,
the answer is plain. The true philosopher will not confine himself to
abstract theories. But, furthermore, Brownson at this epoch of his
life had lost his grip on the philosophy that leads men to trust in a
supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man
who does not look to the hope of a future state of beatitude for the
chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end. If a
man does not seek beatitude in God he seeks it in himself and his
fellow-men--in the highest earthly development of our better nature
if he becomes a socialist of one school, and in the lusts of the
animal man if he becomes a socialist of the brutal school. The man
who has any sympathy in his heart and is not guided by Catholic
ethics, if he reasons at all on public affairs, will become a
socialist of some school or other. Says Dr. Brownson in _The
Convert,_ p. 101:

"The end of man, as disclosed by my creed of 1829, is obviously an