reception at the palace, Boland said these were the actual words Churchill had said to him as far as he could remember them.

Some of Churchill’s earliest and happiest childhood memories were of the time he spent living in what is now Áras an Uachtaráin, where his father Randolph acted as private secretary to his grandfather the Duke of Marlborough, lord lieutenant of Ireland from 1876 to 1880.in the pejorative sense, but indeed rather a revolt against it. Gilson considered the philosophy of his own era to be deteriorating into a science which would signal humanity's abdication of the right to judge and rule nature, humanity made a mere part of nature, which in turn would give the green light for the most reckless of social adventures to play havoc with human lives and institutions. Against "systems" of philosophy, Gilson was convinced that it was the revival of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that opens the way out of that danger zone.

In his time, Gilson was the leading scholar of the history of medieval philosophy as well as a highly regarded philosopher in his own right. His works continue to be reprinted and studied today