Catholics and the Metaphysical Basis of Science

During the 1870s, the decade during which the majority of the meetings of the Metaphysical Society took place, Catholics were grappling with the new environment created by the growing conservatism of their Church. The Catholic members of the Society such as Henry Manning, William Ward, and St. George Mivart adopted dissimilar strategies for dealing with Rome’s conservative turn. In their papers all three were eager to demonstrate that Catholicism was in no way antagonistic to science while they attempted to undermine the metaphysical basis of scientific naturalism. But whereas Manning defended Catholicism by emphasizing the debt of contemporary science to scholastic philosophy, Ward believed that scientific naturalism had to be confronted on its own terms using more modern philosophical weapons. Both Manning and Ward were staunch defenders of ultramontane conservatism, which advocated supreme papal authority. Since Mivart was a liberal Catholic, as well as a highly regarded scientist who accepted a version of evolutionary theory, it is not surprising that he differed from both Manning and Ward in his approach to critiquing scientific naturalism. Mivart not only argued that science must be conceived of as being within the framework of theism, he also drew attention to the emptiness of Huxley’s and Tyndall’s conception of religion as a matter of emotion. This chapter will discuss how these differences in strategy between Catholic religious figures and intellectuals played out within the meetings of the Metaphysical Society.