The ideal formula is true, for it is contained in the first verse of Genesis, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," and in the first article of the creed, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible;" and what it formulates is, as we have shown, and as is shown more at length in "The Problems of the Age," intuitive, and the human mind could not exists and operate if it were not so; but the formula itself, or, rather, the formulation as an intellectual judgment, is not so. The judgment was beyond the reach of all Gentile philosophy, which nowhere asserts or recognizes the fact of creation; it is beyond the reach of the mass even of the Christian people, who hold that God creates the world as an article of faith rather than as a scientific truth; it is denied by nearly all the systems of philosophy constructed by non-Catholics even in our own day, and it may well be doubted if science, unaided by revelation, could ever have attained to it.
This relieves the formula of the principal objections urged against it. The ideas formulated are the first principles in science with which all philosophy must commence, but the formulation, instead of being at the beginning, does not always appear even at its conclusion. The explanations we have offered show that there is no discrepancy between its assertion and the philosophy of St. Thomas. Indeed, the formula in substance is the common doctrine of all great Catholic theologians in all ages of the church, and may be seen to be so if we will only take the pains to understand them and ourselves. The objection, that the doctrine that we have intuition of most perfect being assumes that we have the intuitive vision of God even in this life, cannot stand, because that vision is vision of God as he is in himself, and this asserts only intuition of him as idea, which we even know not by intuition is God. The result of our discussion is to show that the sounder and better philosophy of our day is in reality nothing but the philosophy of St. Anselm and St. Thomas, and which in substance has been always, and still is, taught with more or less clearness and depth in all our Catholic schools.