The Sapientis Institute is an academic project of the International Society of Scholastics. It is intended to provide worldwide educational opportunities in the philosophy of Scholastic Thomism.
The first of our educational endeavors is a unique online program that combines modern technology and a timeless program of Thomistic studies. Through this medium we are able to reach potentially hundreds of thousands of students who, for reasons of geography, age and financial situation, would never be able to complete a course of Thomistic study in the conventional way.
It is our strongest conviction that by providing solid intellectual formation in the classical principles of Scholastic thought we will reunite philosophy with science and science with commonsense. Our educational endeavors aim to give students the tools for a general synthesis of human knowledge-from the evident facts of sense to the highest metaphysical truths.
Ultimately, the Sapientis Institute hopes to establish a school of higher studies where modern scientific and artistic ventures can mature under the watchful gaze of the perennial philosophy of Aristotelian Thomism, where modern experiment will meet ancient experience, where faith and reason will reunite.
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"It is imperative, therefore, that in those different domains we should have explorers and masters who, by their own achievements, may vindicate for themselves the right to speak to the scientific world and to be heard by it; then we can answer the eternal objection that faith blinds us, that faith and reason are incompatible, better far than by abstract principles, better far than by an appeal to the past: we can answer it by the stubborn evidence of actual and living facts.
"If we must devote ourselves to works of analysis we must remember-experience has only too clearly shown-that analysis left to itself easily gives rise to narrowness of mind, to a sort of instinctive antipathy to all that is beyond observed fact, to positive tendencies, if not to positivist convictions.
"But science is not an accumulation of facts; it is a system embracing facts and their mutual relations.
"The particular sciences do not give us a complete representation of reality. They abstract: but the relations which they isolate in thought lie together in reality, and are interwoven with one another; and that is why the special science demand and give rise to a science of sciences, to a general synthesis, in a word, to Philosophy.
"Sound philosophy sets out from analysis and terminates in synthesis as its natural complement.Philosophy is by definition a knowledge of the totality of things through their highest causes. But is it not evident that before arriving at the highest causes we must pass through those lower ones with which the particular sciences occupy themselves?
"At the present day, when the sciences have become so vast and numerous, how are we to achieve the double task of keeping au courant with them all, and of synthesizing their results? That difficulty is a grave and delicate one.
"Since individual courage feels itself powerless in the presence of the field of observation which goes on widening day-by-day, association must make up for the insufficiency of the isolated worker; men of analysis and men of synthesis must come together, and form, by their daily intercourse and united action, an atmosphere suited to the harmonious development of science and philosophy alike. Such is the object of the special School of Philosophy which Leo XIII, the illustrious restorer of higher studies, has wished to found in our country and to place under the patronage of St.
Thomas of Aquin-that striking incarnation of the spirit of observation united with the spirit of synthesis, that worker of genius who ever deemed it a duty to fertilize Philosophy by Science and to elevate Science simultaneously to the heights of Philosophy."
-Désiré Cardinal Mercier on the foundation of the school of Thomistic philosophy at Louvain, at the behest of Leo XIII
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