"...they can only blame themselves..."

Another busy week, and an interesting one. I added two new books to my collection of ancient texts - books which though apparently not referred to by SLJ, can offer some insights into one of our main subjects: the history of science. They are very interesting, and quite old - alas, I only have them in English, though I do hope to obtain them in the original some day:

1. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: a Medieval Guide to the Arts translated by Jerome Taylor. Regarding the word "Arts" in the subtitle, I must quote Taylor's footnote 40 to Book Three: "That Hugh uses the terms 'art' and 'science' interchangably is evident from a comparison of the title and opening sentence of this chapter [three]." The title reads: "Which Arts are principally to be read" and the first sentence begins "Out of all the sciences above named..." There is much meat in this book, and I hope to consider it more fully as time permits.

2. Science and Creation in the Middle Ages: Henry of Langenstein (d. 1397) on Genesis bby Nicholas H. Steneck. This is a study and commentary of Henry's Lecturae super Genesim, but does not contain the text (even in translation). As it mentions Duhem, Buridan and Oresme and others, and examines issues which SLJ also examines, we shall also consider it. It came out in 1976, which was after SLJ's The Relevance of Physics and Science and Creation, but it does not seem to mention SLJ; so far I have not yet noted any mention of Henry in SLJ's writing, though it is possible I have missed the reference. From my casual investigation, it looks to be a relevant and interesting book - certainly the title jumps out!


Now, it is Saturday, so let us have a bit of fun while we learn. Today's excerpt is speaking about the universe....

Taken in itself, any object, in its ontological limitedness, points to God as its only reason for its existence. As Chesterton said somewhere, even a telephone pole proves the existence of God. [Note: I have not yet been able to locate this reference. Dr. T] But no consideration of any object taken separately can demonstrate that it had been produced by God out of nothing in a separate action. All individual objects can be traced to one another. Indeed, this is what science does. It reduces the quantitative aspects of a thing or a group of things to the quantitative aspects of another thing or another group of things. But science cannot assure us about the reality of the totality of things. No matter how many galaxies have been counted or postulated by astronomy, their total sum as calculated or postulated does not necessarily constitute the universe.

The notion of the universe, or the totality of things, is a most philosophical notion. One can argue that totality, for instance, on the epistemological ground that any knowledge is a knowledge of some kind of totality. But anything more here on the intimate epistemological connection between the universals and the universe, would be out of place. There is, I believe, a less abstract argument about the existence of the totality of things, or universe, which is still independent of the actual scientific extent to which man has penetrated into cosmic spaces, either observationally or through his scientific theories. Since the argument begins with real matter, it is not a scientific argument. Science assumes the reality of such matter and only by doing so can it deal with its quantitative properties. Science as such cannot even prove the reality of its very instruments, such as telescopes and microscopes, or even the very existence of scientists. Reference to reality is a philosophical reference, whether some scientists like it or not. And if philosophers or theologians do not like this, they can only blame themselves if in the not too long run they will find themselves with their conceptual pants down.

Now any real matter has quantitative properties. In one way or another all matter can be counted and measured. Scientists as such cannot account for this fact. Some philosophers, like Descartes, tried to do the trick by positing extension as the essence of material reality. In the process, Cartesians lost out not only on reality, but also on science. They even had to give up on God, for good measure. The best approach to the countability of matter is still to be found in the Book of Wisdom where one reads that "God arranged everything according to measure, number, and weight" (11:20). Belief in the Creator is not at all counterproductive when one wants to use the scientific method with a fair dose of logic.
[SLJ "Creation: Once and for All" in The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays 224-5, emphasis added]

...like an extraordinary mountain....

When ten years ago man stepped on the moon, even the sceptics must have sensed that the step was only the start of man's march into the realm of planets. An extraordinary realm, to be sure, which unlike things and processes on earth, appeared to man since ancient times as the realm of exactness. The regularity and precision of the motion of planets became ultimately, in the hands of Newton, the clue to a physics which has not ceased unfolding more and more of the exactness that after all rules this globe of ours as well. One of the great triumphs of that physics was the demonstration by Laplace that the system of which our earth is a principal member has a very large measure of stability, though not an absolute one. The solar system, like anything else, is a child of time. It was born and has grown into its present frame which is destined to collapse in the long run. Indeed, it was a famous hypothesis submitted by Laplace that first assured scientific respectability to an evolutionary approach to the system of planets. In almost two centuries following the first publication of Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and especially during the last three generations, much effort has been spent on elucidating the history of the planetary system. That history is still to be traced out in an essentially satisfactory manner.

Such may seem relatively little progress but even less has been made in what should seem a far easier task, namely, the historiography of those efforts aimed at tracing out that history, or the history of theories of the origin of planetary systems. In fact, there seems to exist on this topic no monograph sufficiently detailed and steeped in the reading of the original documents. While some essay-reviews of the state of the art covering the last few decades are of distinct help to the historian for a primary orientation, he should be rather suspicious of accounts concerning the first three decades of this century. Suspicion should yield to distrust as he tries to orient himself from texts and histories of astronomy about the 19th-century part of the story. Finally, he should not be unwilling to take the attitude of plain disbelief with respect to most secondary information about what had been really proposed during the 18th and 17th centuries on the question. This sad record is largely the making of those who in proposing theories on the evolution of the solar system offered a review of what had been said previously, and of those, also mostly scientifically trained men, who drafted histories of such theories. Their cavalier handling of the facts of scientific history may seem a small matter. Yet a reasonably correct presentation of those facts is of paramount importance with respect to the cultural impact of science. A scientific explanation influences culture in the measure in which it is believed, rightly or wrongly, to be the crowning of past developments. As such, it is apt to be invested with the aura of being the long-sought solution to an age-old problem.

It seems unlikely that there should result beneficial cultural effects from a long chain of unfounded assertions that the final solution had been secured. The many theories already proposed on the evolution of the solar system form such a chain. It hardly ever happened over almost four centuries that a theory on the origin of planets was proposed with a genuine touch of diffidence. This diffidence should have been all the more proper as all theories were held together not so much by solid scientific considerations as by the wish to have tile solution. No wonder that all theories were plagued either by the dubious technique of assuming what was to be explained or by a baffling oversight of the bearing on the question of some basic laws of physics. That first-rate scientists could be guilty on either or both counts should give pause to anyone still fancying that a scientific mind, or any mind using the scientific method, is easily safe from errors, let alone from some elementary mistakes in plain logic.

The search for a satisfactory explanation of the evolution of the system of planets has for its most obvious motivation the urge to know. The system of planets is like an extraordinary mountain in the vast array of the phenomena of nature and it exerts as much an overpowering attraction for scientists as do high peaks for mountaineers. The parallel can be extended further. The conquest of a mountain turns it into a well explored terrain, into one of the various types mountaineers contend with. The explanation of the origin of the system of planets also implies finding in it a typical feature. Typically enough, the preference has always been in favour of finding an explanation which provides assurance that systems of planets are typical, that is, regularly occurring features of the universe. Theories, on the basis of which our own planetary system had to be viewed as an exceedingly rare product of the forces of nature, produced, as a rule, considerable uneasiness.

This difference in appraisals derives from an instinctive commitment to the idea of plenitude, according to which living forms of all grades should be present everywhere in the universe. Since planets are the only known possible abodes for life, theories which promised planets in great numbers found not only ready acceptance, but were also, time and again, embellished with copious remarks, even with lengthy sections, on denizens of other planets. Whether this close tie between theories on the evolution of planetary systems and wishful vistas about planetarians helped or obstructed rigour in scientific reasoning should not be difficult to guess. At any rate, as long as such theories are being constructed with an a priori desire to assure high frequency for planetary systems, the chances remain meagre for an objective evaluation of the possibility that a planetary system like ours may be after all an extremely rare phenomenon, a product of a long chain of interactions of very small probability. A careful survey of the history of the question, and particularly of its most recent phase, may suggest precisely this, especially in view of the fact that although a very wide range of mechanisms have been tried, none of them worked.
[SLJ, introduction to Planets and Planetarians]

SLJ: Wells on Spencer

[SLJ is writing about Vatican I and cosmology]

As to the prophetic character of the definition which had pantheism for its target, this should seem abundantly clear in view of the deification of the earth and of the universe which is turning into a vogue nowadays. To make matters worse, the vogue is fanned time and again by those who should know better. They would profit by studying John Henry Newman whom they often take for their theologian. He proved himself a saintly prophet when in 1838 he spoke of pantheism as "the great deceit which awaits the Age to come."

It was, however, a curious facet of the schemes and their discussions at Vatican I that in connection with that definition nothing was said about new cosmogonies. By the time of Vatican I, Laplacian cosmogenesis had become a chief vehicle of pantheism, especially through its recasting by Herbert Spencer. According to it, the universe had its origin in a supposedly homogeneous fluid, a primordial nebula. Scientists knew only one thing about it, namely, that it was nebulous, but then as now such defects in scientific parlance were readily overlooked by the public increasingly eager to be saved by science. And that cosmogony certainly seemed to assure the naively unwary that since that primordial nebula was homogeneity incarnate, it needed no explanation. The reasoning merely lulled the mind into believing that the universe with such a starting point needed no Creator. For the mind is awakened only when it is confronted with specifics, the very opposite to homogeneity.

It seems indeed that the periti at Vatican I may have missed a good point or two concerning Creed and Universe. At any rate, scientists at that time were not too eager to speak of the universe as such. For most of the time, Laplace's theory meant a discourse only about the evolution of the planetary system, where it failed miserably, a point amply shown by the time of Vatican I. Worse, it was not from within the Neo-Thomist revival sparked after Vatican I that there came the most incisive rebuttal of a cosmogenesis with a homogeneous starting point. It was, of all people, H. G. Wells, a professed agnostic and sometime atheist, who noted, though only a generation after the death of Herbert Spencer: "He [Spencer] believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an evolutionary product from an original homogeneity, begotten by folding and multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and still fundamentally it."
[SLJ Universe and Creed 17-19]

Note: See also chapter 2, "Nebulosity Dissipated" in SLJ's God and the Cosmologists and chapter 6, "The Angular Barrier" in SLJ's Planets and Planetarians: A History of Theories of the Origin of Planetary Systems . The Wells quote is from his First and Last Things: Confession of Faith and Rule of Life.

Jaki on C. P. Snow

A friend from the ACS blogg asked if I had ever heard of C. P. Snow. I answered, yes, not of my own, but as he is mentioned occasionally by Fr. Jaki.... and then I wondered just how often SLJ cites Snow. Such plodding tasks are often left to grad students, but I couldn't find any just now, so in a spare moment, I looked around to see what I might find. There are rather more citations than I could hope to quote today.... so if one wants project for a Snow Day (!!!) perhaps a little monograph or journal article, it would no doubt be helpful for our Society.

Probably the best starting point would be "A Hundred Years of Two Cultures" in Jaki's Chance or Reality and Other Essays, but I will just give a few excerpts from other places:

Humanities have either been turned into mysticism as was done in Polanyi's doctrine of personal knowledge in which science too becomes ultimately mystical, or they have been turned into mere epiphenomena as shown by the writings of Bronowski, or they were merely given charming literary lip-service as illustrated by the oracular utterances of the late high-priest of two cultures, C. P. Snow. The common delusion of all these efforts is the inability of their proponents, or their lack of courage, to recognize and to proclaim that science is a limited knowledge.
[SLJ "Maritain and Science" in Chance or Reality and Other Essays 56]

The total, if not totalitarian, response of society to science was advocated by many others in a way which usually gives itself away by its crudeness. Of the sophisticated advocacies of the same idea, one deserves to be mentioned in particular, and for two reasons. First, because it was proposed recently; second, because its message was uncritically swallowed in academic circles. What I have in mind is C. P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture of 1959, better known as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. From the viewpoint of composition it is certainly a masterpiece. It shows Lord Snow at his literary best. He dazzles his reader with gem-like phrases and fascinating little stories. They seem to serve one principal purpose, namely, to disarm the reader's critical sense. For unless one's mind is dazzled, how can one accept a reasoning which runs like this: Among educated men, scientists know more about culture than non-scientists or literary people. Among scientists, practical scientists or engineers are more attuned to culture than are theoretical scientists. As a third step, Lord Snow claimed that among engineers the so-called inventive engineers, who usually work individually, if not individualistically, are less sensitive to culture than engineers who work in teams on the technologization of society. And finally, Lord Snow suggested that the capitalist West should take a leaf or two from the program of the Soviet Union, because it trains far more engineers than do France, Germany, England, and the United States taken together. Six years later, in 1965, in a lecture given in Washington, Lord Snow remarked that the Soviet Union is far more successful politically, because not a few of its leaders were originally trained as engineers, and, therefore, they think more systematically and more scientifically.
In raising these matters it is not politics that I want to emphasize. My sole purpose is to illustrate the trend which thinks that culture and progress should be entrusted to engineers, and specifically to one type of engineer. One of the troubles with this trend is that it does not even understand what it purports to explain, the so-called social roots of science. Lord Snow himself unwittingly admitted this as he commented on the very effective use of science in industry during the late 1800s in Germany. As Lord Snow put it, the spectacular rise of German industrial organization around 1880 or so, made for him "no social sense." The trouble with that remark is that if the meaning of making sense is restricted to the meaning of "making social sense, " then many important things are not going to make sense. Among these things is science itself.
[SLJ "The Last Century of Science: Progress, Problems, and Prospects" in The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays 163-4]

Leighton acknowledged that quantum electrodynamics could not cope with phenomena that directly involved nuclear forces, weak interactions, and gravitation. For all that, quantum mechanics seemed to him to hold the key to all physics. "With the rapid advances that are being made in particle physics," wrote Leighton, "perhaps it is not too much to expect that in a few more decades all physical phenomena will be equally well understood." A generation earlier, C. P. Snow, the future novelist-laureate of the scientific community, had already diagnosed the same conviction as he let scientists speak of what had just been achieved by the discoverers of quantum mechanics: "They had found the boundary of knowledge, something would remain unknown forever." What this implied for all men of science, of those times and of all times to come, was put in their mouths by Snow as follows: "One of the results of this new representation of matter was to tell us what we could not know as well as what we could. We were in sight of the end." To be in sight of the end can easily provoke a peculiar feeling, especially in moderns who had replaced God, the infinite, with an endless search in an allegedly infinite universe, and who had grown accustomed to setting (with Lessing's Nathan) a higher value on the search for truth than on the possession of truth itself. No wonder that they were deeply perplexed by being in sight of the end. As Snow voiced the feeling of one of them: "It seemed incredible to me, brought up in the tradition of limitless searching." This limitless search meant a distrust of limits, an uneasiness about the limited field, however vast. Commitment to the infinite implied the absence of agoraphobia, the very opposite of fear of the circumscribed, the only fear with intellectual, or rather scientific respectability. As Snow's scientist mused of that limitless search: "Í resented leaving it."
Snow's scientist spoke in the name of practically all his colleagues in theoretical physics, but they certainly did not include Einstein. The ones Einstein could count as his allies were few and far between though hardly negligible. In addition to Planck, there was Schrödinger, one of the architects of quantum theory. In a letter of August 8, 1939, to Schrödinger, Einstein spoke to him of his viewpoint which, as Einstein put it, "has driven me into a deep solitude." The viewpoint related above all to the question of whether reality existed independently of the observer, a question which most cultivators of quantum mechanics answered in the negative. Schrödinger had them and their often arcane formulas in mind when a decade or so later he remarked in a lecture dealing with the modern, scientific notion of material reality: "A widely accepted school of thought maintains that an objective picture of reality - in any traditional meaning of that term - cannot exist at all. Only the optimists among us (and I consider myself one of them) look upon this view as a philosophical extravagance born of despair in face of a grave crisis. We hope that the fluctuations of concepts and opinions only indicate a violent process of transformation which in the end will lead to something better than the mess of formulas that to-day surrounds our subject."
In its original form the crisis consisted in the inability to accomplish anything more than an ad hoc systematization of some of tens of thousands of spectral lines carefully measured during the decades straddling the turn of the century. In 1913 Bohr's atom model brought some relief, but it promised more than it immediately delivered. Once it was applied beyond the simplest lines of the hydrogen atom, an increasing number of arbitrary corrections had to be grafted onto it to make it work. The situation appeared so unsatisfactory as to prompt Ehrenfest to remark that teaching mathematical physics in its present confusion gave him insight into Hegelian dialectics, "a succession of leaps from one lie to another by way of intermediate falsehoods." About the same time Pauli wrote: "At the moment physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort and had never heard of physics." A few months later, after the publication in 1925 of Heisenberg's paper on matrix mechanics, Pauli wrote: "Heisenberg's type of mechanics has again given me hope and joy in life. To be sure, it does not supply the solution to the riddle, but I believe it is again possible to march forward." Pauli by then was famous through his contribution of the fourth quantum number, later known as spin, which permitted the derivation of the periodicity in the table of elements. But the spin was still an ad hoc device, however successful. When something of its logic was unfolded in 1929 through the work of Dirac, the perspective of Einstein was once more vindicated, but this was noted only many years later and by Dirac himself.
[SLJ "The Horns of Complementarity" in The Road of Science and the Ways To God 197-9]

Our Society: A Plea On Behalf of Truth

For your consideration: some more about our purpose, and a strong appeal to work, yes, even as scientists, for the conversion of others... did you know that Jaki's work was a driving force in conversions? What are we waiting for? Be sure to make your work - at your lab bench or desk or computer, at home or at play or in church - a plea on behalf of truth.
--Dr. Thursday

The question, whether one can know that there is a universe, a concept which Kant disqualified as a bastard product of the metaphysical craving of the intellect, is of course constantly staring any and all scientific cosmologists in the face. It will not be avoided by replacing the term universe, this most catholic entity insofar as it stands for the totality of consistently interacting things, with the term rnultiverse, which is but a verbal cover-up for endorsing cosmic incoherence, a most unscientific perspective indeed. On a different level, work in biology, especially in genetics, brings up with ever greater pressure questions that are ethical in that supreme sense in which ethics relates to the very catholic core of personhood.

A Catholic intellectual must be ready to face up to such questions and in a genuinely Catholic sense. And if he has not acquired the ability to cope with such questions, he at least must have a vivid conviction that Catholic answers can be given to such questions, and indeed have been given time and again. And, most importantly, the Catholic intellectual must not turn the truth of those answers into a function of the measure of their acceptance in secular academia, which is well nigh zero in most cases.

A Catholic intellectual must be ready to swim against the tide which will flow against him until the end of time. He must not dream about a new Middle Ages, partly because those Ages were very mediocre in many ways, and partly because history cannot be replayed. Utopia and history are mutually exclusive notions. The Catholic intellectual cannot meditate often enough on an often overlooked statement in the Documents of Vatican II about the grim struggle between the Church and the World, a struggle that shall never abate. A Catholic intellectual is, of course, fully entitled to wonder about the strange disproportionality between that gigantic struggle and its brief portrayal in those Documents.

The Catholic intellectual must be ready to recognize opportunities for Catholic research in his own field. The case of Pierre Duhem (1861-1916) remains most instructive. He did not dream of what he would eventually find as he started searching for the historical origin of the principle of virtual velocities, a cornerstone of the science of motion. He wanted to do no more than show that historically too, the exact science of physics was an economic coordination of data of measurements and therefore unqualified to say anything ontological, let alone metaphysical.

This is not to suggest that a vast portrayal of this point would not have contained a great liberating vision, the prospect of sidelining once and for all the specter of scientism. But when Duhem found that the first intimation of that principle was done in the medieval Sorbonne, he did not hesitate to put everything aside. The result was a portrayal in a dozen or so vast volumes of the medieval Christian origin of Newtonian science.

Duhem himself, a staunch and devout Catholic from childhood, gave a priceless account of this intellectual odyssey of his in his essay, "Physics of a Believer," which should be compulsory reading for all Catholic intellectuals, whether scientists or not. Perhaps the meditative reading of that essay will give them the inspiration to put a great deal aside when even a remotely similar opportunity arises before their searching eyes.I mentioned Duhem partly because I found in his lifework, combining the task of a physicist, of an historian and philosopher of science, and of an artist to boot, a truly catholic and Catholic inspiration, in more than one sense. Certainly inspiring should seem his resolve not to be discouraged by secular academia's systematic slighting of him during his life. He held it to be his greatest satisfaction when he received word about the intellectual support which Catholic university people and students found in his writings.

The fact that some non-Catholic readers of my The Relevance of Physics and of my Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and the Ways to God found in them a major incentive to join the Catholic Church remains for me far more precious than some prestigious prizes. Not that either of those books was apologetics in any sense. They were mere pleas, as any intellectual effort should be, on behalf of truth.
[SLJ "The Catholic Intellectual" in The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays 34-5, emphasis added]

Postscript from Dr. Thursday: Confer, if you will, this parallel thought from Chesterton:

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. A dead dog can be lifted on the leaping water with all the swiftness of a leaping hound; but only a live dog can swim backwards. A paper boat can ride the rising deluge with all the airy arrogance of a fairy ship; but if the fairy ship sails upstream it is really rowed by the fairies.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:388]

Science: Einstein and Aquinas (and others)

The essence of that post-metaphysical philosophy is summed up in that phrase of Sartre: "We can go no further." What he meant to say was that philosophy cannot go as far as the universe. This was exactly Kant's major contention. But this is exactly what many scientific cosmologists, and scientists in general, find difficult to accept since Einstein published that great memoir of his in 1917. This is not to say that prior to that scientists in general doubted the existence of the universe. They always felt it in their bones that scientific findings, insofar as they helped establish scientific laws, had universal significance or a signification relating to the universe itself. They knew this long before Popper testified to an old truth with a new phrase, namely, that all science is cosmology. But since that memoir of Einstein no one can repeat Kant's cosmological antinomies and still appear scientific, a trick by which Kant had set so great a store.

Those philosophers who try to dissipate the great shadow which Einstein is casting on them can do no better than be very brief about Einstein's science. And lest they should thereby appear either incompetent or contemptuous, they should follow Sartre's art of throwing a red herring in the form of a pleasing but brief metaphor. "Life is limited by life: it becomes like the world of Einstein, finite but unlimited," - was Sartre's sole reference to Einstein's cosmology in a context that dealt with being as very distinct from nothingness.

Indeed, for Einstein the world was a being, and the most encompassing being at that. For him the universe was not his world, the world of his ideas, but a reality best revealed by the best in science. He was most conscious on this point. A decade before Sartre was to reject the Nobel Prize in literature in 1965, there appeared in Paris the correspondence between Einstein and M. Solovine, his friend from student days. To Solovine's query whether Einstein had become a believer, nay a Catholic, on the basis of his cosmology, Einstein replied, of course, in the negative. But he also stated that only the step from the universe to God was illegitimate but not the march to the universe itself.

Einstein, of course, thought that science took him as far as the universe. It did not. Science does not take the scientist even as far as the reality of his most trivial scientific instruments. The scientist assumes the reality of things before he can engage in his only legitimate business which is to establish the quantitative properties of things existing. Reasoned discourse about the existence of things is the very business of that ontology for which modern philosophy has no use. Ontology is subtly reduced to the art of aping what science does when one reads with approval W. Quine's declaration: "To be, I have persistently held, is to be the value of a variable." Obviously, Quine did not mean Aristotle's or Thomas's analogy of being. Although they both admitted the various realizations of being, they did so only because they held, in their own ways, that there was an ultimate being which was not variable.
[SLJ Universe and Creed 64-6, emphasis added]

"Reason is itself a matter of faith."
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:236]

Without pretending to span within such limits the essential Thomist idea, I may be allowed to throw out a sort of rough version of the fundamental question, which I think I have known myself, consciously or unconsciously since my childhood. When a child looks out of the nursery window and sees anything, say the green lawn of the garden, what does he actually know; or does he know anything? There are all sorts of nursery games of negative philosophy played round this question. A brilliant Victorian scientist delighted in declaring that the child does not see any grass at all; but only a sort of green mist reflected in a tiny mirror of the human eye. This piece of rationalism has always struck me as almost insanely irrational. If he is not sure of the existence of the grass, which he sees through the glass of a window, how on earth can he be sure of the existence of the retina, which he sees through the glass of a microscope? If sight deceives, why can it not go on deceiving? Men of another school answer that grass is a mere green impression on the mind; and that he can be sure of nothing except the mind. They declare that he can only be conscious of his own consciousness; which happens to be the one thing that we know the child is not conscious of at all. In that sense, it would be far truer to say that there is grass and no child, than to say that there is a conscious child but no grass. St. Thomas Aquinas, suddenly intervening in this nursery quarrel, says emphatically that the child is aware of Ens. Long before he knows that grass is grass, or self is self, he knows that something is something. Perhaps it would be best to say very emphatically (with a blow on the table), 'There is an Is". That is as much monkish credulity as St. Thomas asks of us at the start. Very few unbelievers start by asking us to believe so little. And yet, upon this sharp pin-point of reality, he rears by long logical processes that have never really been successfully overthrown, the whole cosmic system of Christendom.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:528-9]

Some great pictures...

Visit Casa Santa Lidia for some great pictures!