274 R WINTEETON : PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE JESUITS.

Scholasticism was plainly doomed, and the decree above quoted is a proof of what was going on within the Society. That it was not sufficiently enforced is certain ; for, only twenty-one years after, in 1751, the seventeenth General Con- gregation found it necessary to remind members of its provi- sions. This was again a useless protest. Cartesianism had succeeded in destroying the confidence they had once felt in the old doctrine ; and with less confidence came, of course, less study, which engendered greater distrust ; and so on. We know what the last Jesuits of the 18th century taught an amalgam of propositions taken at random from authors of the most opposite opinions. Read the works of Hauser, Mayr, Storchenau, Zallinger and the other best-known Jesuits who at that period wrote upon philosophy. They did not even understand the difference between the Scholastic theory of ideas and Lockian or Gassendian empiricism ; in the problem of the union of mind with matter they main- tained the theory of Plato, and Descartes' influxus physicus, taking these for identical with the Aristotelian system ; they made not the slightest difference between the sensitive and the spiritual faculties of the soul. These poor represen- tatives of the School for they believed themselves to be Scholastics quoted at every page Locke, Leibniz, Des- cartes, Wolff, Bacon, Gassendi (a singular collection), as authorities by whom every question was to be decided ; but as for Aquinas, his works had become almost a terra incognita for them. True, they were practically faithful to their great maxim even then. Scholasticism was at that time so entirely overwhelmed with ridicule, so completely unknown, that it would have been a task above their forces to set it up again. They would have undergone no end of criticism, and times were not such that they could afford to render themselves laughing-stocks more than was absolutely neces- sary. They therefore tried, by a practically clever, though most unphilosophical, mixture of different doctrines that were not hostile to the Church of Rome, to keep pace with their century without giving way to it. But enough has been said to show that when the Society of Jesus was dissolved towards the end of the century, its philosophical power and influence had already been wholly lost. Here the present article may be brought to a close. The history of philosophy amongst the Jesuits in our century is closely connected with the contemporary revival of Scholas- ticism, and may perhaps on some future occasion be treated in this connexion.