—————
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 6, 1903
Father Thomas Hagerty on Socialism, Scientific and Idealistic
From the International Socialist Review of February 1903:
Socialism Versus Fads.
[-by Father Thomas Hagerty]
———-[Part I of II]
A LACK of what Whewell so aptly calls “the habit of geometrical thought” is noticeable in much of the confusion which upsets men’s judgment of Socialism. Many persons, earnest in their work for the co-operative common wealth, have only one measure for all problems. From their iron prejudices they forge a Procustean bed upon which they stretch every event too small to fit it and foreshorten every long-limbed fact which has the misfortune to stick over its rigid limits. Thus, as Locke has observed, “some men have so used their heads to mathematical figures, that in giving a preference to the methods of that science, they introduce lines and diagrams into their study of divinity or political inquiries, as if nothing could be known with out them; and others accustomed to retired speculations run natural philosophy into metaphysical notions and the abstract generalities of logic; and how often may one meet with religion and morality treated of in the terms of the laboratory, and thought to be improved by the methods and notions of chemistry?” *
Evidences of the effect of this method abound in every age. Thales of Miletus, the founder of Greek philosophy, based his teachings of Nature on the theory that out of water all things are made. Water is the primal matter and the earth itself floats upon water. The great Philo of Alexandria taught, after the manner of Plato, that the stars are persons endowed with reason and akin to the Divinity. The early churchmen took the Bible as the sole measure of scientific truth and, in consequence, fell into the most childish errors. Many of them denied the sphericity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes. The learned St. Augustine declared that no men live on the other side of the earth because “Scripture speaks of no such descendants of Adam.”
