John Alexander Gunn

INTRODUCTION: The scientific outlook—Progress of the sciences—The positivist spirit, its action on science, philosophy and literature—The problem as presented to philosophy.

I. Comte’s positivism—Work of prominent scientists—Position maintained by Berthelot and Bernard—Renan’s confidence—Vacherot and Taine—Insufficiency of sciences alone.

II. Cournot and Renouvier attack the dogmatism of science.

III. The neo-spiritualist group continue and develop this attack, which becomes a marked feature in Lachelier, Boutroux, and Bergson.

Entire change of attitude in the development of the period.

The problem of freedom opened up in the process.

Having thus surveyed the main currents of our period and indicated the general attitude adopted to knowledge by the various thinkers, we approach more closely to the problem of the relation of science and philosophy. The nineteenth century was a period in which this problem was keenly felt, and France was the country in which it was tensely discussed by the most acute minds among the philosophers and among the scientists. French thought and culture, true to the tradition of the great geometrician and metaphysician Descartes, have produced men whose training has been highly scientific as well as philosophical. Her philosophers have been keenly versed in mathematics and physical science, while her scientists have had considerable power as philosophical thinkers.

One of the very prominent tendencies of thought in the first half of the nineteenth century was the growing belief and confidence in the natural sciences. In France this was in large measure due to the progress of those sciences themselves and to the influences of Comte, which was supported by the foreign influences of Kant’s teaching and that of the English School, particularly John Stuart Mill. These three great streams of thought, widely different in many respects, had this in common—that they tended to confuse philosophy and science to such a degree that it seemed doubtful whether the former could be granted any existence by itself. Science, somewhat intoxicated by the praise and worship bestowed upon her, became proud, arrogant and overbearing. She scorned facts which could not be adapted to her own nature, she ignored data which were not quantitative and materialistic, and she regarded truth as a system of laws capable of expression by strict mathematical methods and formulae*. Hence science became characterised by a firm belief in absolute determinism, in laws of necessity operating after the manner of mathematical laws. This “universal mathematic” endeavoured also to explain the complex by reference to the simple. Difficulties were encountered all along the line, for experience, it was found, did not quite fit into rigid formulae*, “new” elements of experience presented a unique character and distressing discrepancy. Confidence in science, however, was not shaken by this, for the perfect science, it was imagined, was assured in a short time. Patience might be needed, but no doubt was entertained of the possibility of such a construction. Doubters were told to look at the rising sciences of psychology and sociology, which, as Auguste Comte had himself prophesied, were approaching gradually to the “type” venerated—namely, an exact and mathematical character. Biology, it was urged, was merely a special branch of physico-chemistry. As for beliefs in freedom, in art, morality and religion, these, like philosophy (metaphysics) itself, belonged to the earlier stages (the theological and metaphysical) of Comte’s list, stages rapidly to be replaced by the third and final “positive” era.

Such, briefly stated, were the affirmations so confidently put forward on behalf of science by its devoted worshippers. Confidence in science was a marked feature of the work written by Renan in the years 1848-1849, L’Avenir de la Science. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, Renan himself played a large part in undermining this confidence. Yet the time of his writing this work is undoubtedly the period when the confidence in science was most marked. By this it is not implied that an even greater confidence in science has not been professed since by many thinkers. That is probably true, but the important point is that at this time the confidence in science was less resisted than ever in its history. It seemed to have a clear field and positivism seemed to be getting unto itself a mighty victory.

The cult of facts, which is so marked a characteristic of the scientific or positivist temper, penetrated, it is interesting to note, into the realm of literature, where it assumed the form of “realism.” In his Intelligence we find Taine remarking, “de tout petits fails bien choisis, importants, significatifs, amplement circonstanciÉs et minutieusement notÉs, voilÀ aujourd’hui la matiÈre de toute science.”^[1] It was also, in the opinion of several writers, the matiÈre de toute littÉrature. The passion for minute details shows itself in the realism of Flaubert and Zola, in the psychology of Stendthal* and the novels of the Goncourts. It was no accident that their works were so loved by Taine. A similar spirit of “positivism” or “realism” animated both them and him.

[1] Preface to Intelligence.

With the turn of the half century, however, a change manifested itself by the fact that the positivist current began to turn against itself, and our period is, in some respects, what FouillÉe has called la rÉaction centre la science positive.^[2] The function of philosophy is essentially criticism, and although at that period the vitality of philosophy was low, it nevertheless found enough energy to criticise the demands and credentials of Science.

[2] Compare also Aliotta’s book, The Idealistic Reaction against Science, Eng. trans., 19l4.

The publication of Claude Bernard’s volume Introduction À la MÉdecine experimentale^[3] drew from the pen of Paul Janet, the last of the Eclectic School dominated by Cousin, an article of criticism which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and was later published in his volume of essays entitled, Les ProblÈmes du XIX^e SiÈcle. Although Janet’s essay reveals all the deficiencies of the older spiritualism, he makes a gallant attempt to combat the dogmatism and the assumed finality of Bernard’s point of view and that of the scientists in general. Janet regarded the sciences and their relation to philosophy as constituting an important problem for the century and in this judgment he was not mistaken.

[3] Cf. Livre III., Science, chap, i., on “Method in General”; chap, ii., on The Experimental Method in Physiology,” pp. 213-279.

I

We have, in our Introductory Chapter, reckoned Auguste Comte among the influential antecedents of our period. Here, in approaching the study of the problem of science, we may note that the tendency towards the strictly scientific attitude, and to the promotion of the scientific spirit in general, was partly due to the influence of his positivism. Comte’s intended Religion of Humanity failed, his system of positive philosophy has been neglected, but the SPIRIT which he inculcated has abided and has borne fruit. We would be wrong, however, if we attributed much to Comte as the originator of that spirit. His positive philosophy, although it greatly stimulated and strengthened the positive attitude adopted by the natural sciences, was itself in large measure inspired by and based upon these sciences. Consequently much of Comte’s glory was a reflected light, his thought was a challenge to the old spiritualism, an assertion of the rights of the sciences to proclaim their existence and to demand serious consideration.

Although he succeeded in calling the attention of philosophy to the natural sciences, yet owing to the mere fact that he based himself on the sciences of his day much of his thought has become obsolete by the progress and extension of those very sciences themselves. He tended, with a curious dogmatism, to assign limits to the sciences by keeping them in separate compartments and in general by desiring knowledge to be limited to human needs. Although there is important truth in his doctrine of discontinuity or irreducible differences, the subsequent development of the natural sciences has cleared away many barriers which he imagined to be impassable. There still are, and may always be, gaps in our knowledge of the progress from inorganic to organic, from the living creature to self-conscious personality, but we have a greater conception of the unity of Nature than had Comte. Many new ideas and discoveries have transformed science since his day, particularly the doctrines dealing with heat as a form of motion, with light, electricity, and the radio-activity of matter, the structure of the atom, and the inter-relation of physics and chemistry.

Comte’s claim for different methods in the different departments of science is of considerable interest, in view of present-day biological problems and the controversies of vitalists, mechanists and neo-vitalists.^[4] Although Comte insisted upon discontinuity, yet he urged the necessity for an esprit d’ensemble, the consideration of things synthetically, in their “togetherness.” He feared that analysis, the esprit de dÉtail or mathematisation, was being carried out À l’outrance. This opinion he first stated in 1825 in his tract entitled ConsidÉrations sur les Sciences et les Savants. On the social side he brought this point out further by insisting on the esprit d’ensemble as involving the social standpoint in opposition to a purely individualistic view of human life.

[4] See, for example, The Mechanism of Life, by Dr. Johnstone, Professor of Oceanography in the University of Liverpool. (Arnold, 1921.)

Comte was slow to realise the importance of Ethics as an independent study. Psychology he never recognised as a separate discipline, deeming it part of physiology. He gave a curious appreciation to phrenology. Unfortunately he overlooked the important work done by the introspectionist psychologists in England and the important work of Maine de Biran in his own country. One is struck by Comte’s inability to appreciate the immense place occupied by psychology in modern life and in particular its expression in the modern novel and in much modern poetry. An acquaintance with the works of men like De Regnier, Pierre Loti and Anatole France is sufficient to show how large a factor the psychological method is in French literature and life. It is to be put down to Comte’s eternal discredit that he failed to appreciate psychology. Here lies the greatest defect in his work, and it is in this connection that his work is now being supplemented. Positivism in France to-day is not a synonym for “Comtism” at all; the term is now employed to denote the spirit and temper displayed in the methods of the exact sciences. For Comte, we must never forget, scientific investigation was a means and not an end in itself. His main purpose was social and political regeneration. Positivism since Comte differs from his philosophy by a keen attention bestowed upon psychology, and many of Comte’s inadequate conceptions have been enriched by the introduction of a due recognition of psychological factors.

It is to be noted that Comte died two years before Darwin’s chef-d’oeuvre appeared, and that he opposed the doctrine of evolution as put forward by Lamarck. Although Comte’s principle of discontinuity may in general have truth in it, the problem is a far more complicated one than he imagined it to be. Again, while Comte’s opposition to the subjectivism of Cousin was a wholesome influence, he did not accord to psychology its full rights, and this alone has been gravely against the acceptance of his philosophy, and explains partly the rise and progress of the new spiritualist doctrines. His work served a useful purpose, but Comte never closed definitely with the problem of the precise significance of “positivism” or with its relation to a general conception of the universe; in short, he confined himself to increasing the scientific spirit in thought, leaving aside the difficulty of relating science and philosophy.

Comte stated in his Philosophie positive^[5] that he regarded attempts to explain all phenomena by reference to one law as futile, even when undertaken by the most competent minds well versed in the study of the sciences. Although he believed in discontinuity he tried to bridge some gaps, notably by his endeavour to refer certain physiological phenomena to the law of gravitation.

[5] Vol. i., pp. 53-56.

The chief work which this undoubtedly great mind accomplished was the organisation of the scientific spirit as it appeared in his time. Renan hardly does justice to him in his sarcastic remark in his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse. “I felt quite irritated at the idea of Auguste Comte being dignified with the title of a great man for having expressed in bad French what all scientific minds had seen for the last two hundred years as clearly as he had done.” His work merits more than dismissal in such a tone, and we may here note, as the essence of the spirit which he tried to express, his definition of the positive or scientific attitude to the universe given at the commencement of his celebrated Cours de Philosophie positive. There, in defining the positive stage, Comte speaks of it as that period in which “the human spirit, recognising the impossibility of obtaining absolute conceptions, abandons the search for the origin and the goal of the universe and the inner causes of things, to set itself the task merely of discovering, by reasoning and by experience combined, the effective laws of phenomena—that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and of similarity.”^[6] This positive spirit Comte strove to express rather than to originate, for it was already there in the sciences. Undoubtedly his work made it more prominent, more clear, and so we have to note an interaction between positivism in the sciences and in philosophy.

[6] LeÇon i.

It is equally important for our purpose to notice that the period was one rich in scientific thought. The work of Lavoisier and Bichat, both of whom as contemporaries of Maine de Biran, belong to the former century, was now bearing fruit. Lavoisier’s influence had been great over chemistry, which he established on a modern basis, by formulating the important theory of the conservation of mass and by clearing away false and fan- tastic conceptions regarding combustion.^[7] Bichat, the great anatomist and physiologist, died in 1802, but the publication of his works in a completed form was not accomplished until 1854. The work and influence of the AcadÉmie des Sciences are noteworthy features of French culture at this time. There stands out prominently the highly important work of Cuvier in anatomy, zoology and palÆontology.^[8] The nineteenth century was a period of great scientists and of great scientific theories. Leverrier, applying himself to the problem of the motions of Uranus, found a solution in the hypothesis of another planet, Neptune, which was actually discovered from his calculations in 1846. This was a notable victory for logical and scientific method. In 1809 Lamarck had outlined, prior to Spencer or Darwin, the scheme of the evolutionary theory (Transformism).^[9] Spencer’s work, which appeared from 1850 onwards, has always commanded respect and attention in France even among its critics.^[10] Interest increased upon the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, and its translation into French in 1862. These dates coincide with the rise of the SociÉtÉ d’Anthropologie de Paris, founded by Broca in the same year that Darwin’s book appeared. Another translation from Darwin’s work followed in 1872, Descendance de l’Homme, which aroused further interest in the evolutionary theory. At the same time the work of men such as Pasteur, Bertrand, Berthelot and Bernard gave an impetus and a power to science. Poincare belongs rather to the twentieth century. Pasteur (1822-1895) showed mankind how science could cure its ills by patient labour and careful investigation, and earned the world’s gratitude for his noble work. His various Discours and his volume, Le Budget de la Science (1868), show his faith in this progressive power of science. In Bertrand (1822-1900), his contemporary who held the position of Professor of Mathematics at the College de France, a similar attitude appears.

[7] Lavoisier perished at the guillotine in 1794, and his death was a tragic loss to science.

[8] Cuvier’s Anatomie comparÉe appeared in the years 1800-1805, following his Histoire naturelle (1798-1799). Later came his Rapport sur les Sciences naturelles (1810) and his work Le Regne animal (1816).He died in 1832. We may note that Cuvier opposed the speculative evolutionary doctrines of Lamarck, with whom he indulged in controversy.

[9] In his work, Philosophie zoologique, ou Exposition des ConsidÉrations relatives a l’Histoire naturelle des Animaux, 2 vols Paris, Dentu, 1809.

[10] His Social Statics was published in 1850, and his Psychology five years later. His life work, The Synthetic Philosophy, extends over the period 1860-1896.

One of the foremost scientific minds, however, was Claude Bernard (1813-1878), a friend of Renan, who held the Chair of Medicine at the College de France, and was, in addition, the Professor of Physiology at the FacultÉ des Sciences at the Sorbonne. Science, Bernard maintained, concerns itself only with phenomena and their laws. He endeavoured in his celebrated Introduction À l’Etude de la MÉdÉcine expÉrimentale, published in 1865, to establish the science of physiology upon a sound basis, having respect only to fact, not owning homage to theories of a metaphysical character or to the authority of persons or creeds. He desired to obtain by such a rigorous and precise method, objectivity. “The experimental method is,” he insists, “the really scientific method, which proclaims the freedom of the human spirit and its intelligence. It not only shakes off the yoke of metaphysics and of theology, in addition it refuses to admit personal considerations and subjective standpoints.”^[11]

[11] Introduction À l’Etude de la MÉdÉcine expÉrimentale, chap. ii, sect. 4.

Bernard’s attitude is distinctly that of a positivist, and the general tone of his remarks as well as his attitude on many special points agrees with that of Comte. His conclusions regarding physiology are akin to those expressed by Comte concerning biology. Bernard excludes any metaphysical hypothesis such as the operation of a vital principle, and adheres strictly to physicochemical formulas. He accepts, however, Comte’s warning about the reduction of the higher to terms of the lower, or, in Spencerian phraseology, the explanation of the more complex by the less complex. Consequently, he carefully avoids the statement that he desires to “reduce” physiology to physics and chemistry. He makes no facile and light-hearted transition as did Spencer; on the contrary, he claims that the living has some specific quality which cannot be “reduced” to other terms, and which cannot be summed up in the formulae of physics or chemistry. The physiologist and the medical practitioner must never overlook the fact that every living being forms an organism and an individuality. The physiologist, continues Bernard, must take notice of this unity or harmony of the whole, even while he penetrates the interior to know the mechanism of each of its parts. The physicist and the chemist can ignore any notion of final causes in the facts they observe, but the physiologist must admit a harmonious finality, a harmony pre-established in the organism, whose actions form and express a unity and solidarity, since they generate one another. Life itself is creation; it is not capable of expression merely in physico-chemical formulae. The creative character, which is its essence, never can be so expressed. Bernard postulated an abstract, idÉe directrice et crÉatrice, presiding over the evolution of an organism. “Dans tout germe vivant, il y a une idÉe crÉatrice qui se dÉveloppe et se manifeste par l’organisation. Pendant toute sa durÉe l’Être vivant reste sous l’influence de cette mÊme force vitale, crÉatrice, et la mort arrive lorsqu’elle ne peut plus se rÉaliser. Ici comme partout, tout dÉrive de l’idÉe, qui, seule, crÉe et dirige.”^[12]

[12] Introduction À l’Etude de la MÉdÉcine expÉrimentale, p.151 ff.

The positivist spirit is again very marked in the doctrines of Berthelot (1827-1907), another very great friend of Renan, who, in addition to being a Senator, and Minister of Education and of Foreign Affairs, held the Chair of Organic Chemistry at the CollÈge de France. In 1886 he published his volume, Science et Philosophie, which contains some interesting and illuminating observations upon La Science idÉale et la Science positive. Part of this, it may be noted, was written as early as 1863, in correspondence with Renan, and as a reply to a letter of his of which we shall speak presently.^[13] Berthelot states his case with a clearness which merits quotation.

[13] See the Fragments of Renan, published 1876, pp 193-241. Reponse de M. Berthelot.

“Positive science,” he says, “seeks neither first causes nor the ultimate goal of things. In order to link together a multitude of phenomena by one single law, general in character and conformable to the nature of things, the human spirit has followed a simple and invariable method. It has stated the facts in accordance with observation and experience, compared them, extracted their relations, that is the general facts, which have in turn been verified by observation and experience, which verification constitutes their only guarantee of truth. A progressive generalisation, deduced from prior facts and verified unceasingly by new observations, thus brings our knowledge from the plane of particular and popular facts to general laws of an abstract and universal character. But, in the construction of this pyramid of science, everything from base to summit rests upon observation and experience. It is one of the principles of positive science that no reality can be established by a process of reasoning. The universe cannot be grasped by a priori methods.”

Like Comte, Berthelot believed in the progress of all knowledge through a theological and metaphysical stage to a definitely scientific or positive era. The sciences are as yet young, and we cannot imagine the development and improvement, social and moral, which will accrue from their triumph in the future. For Berthelot, as for Renan, the idea of progress was bound up essentially with the triumph of the scientific spirit. In a Discourse at the Sorbonne given in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his being appointed Professor at the CollÈge de France, we find this faith in science reiterated. “To-day,” he remarks, “Science claims a triple direction of societies, materially, intellectually and morally. By this fact the role of the men of science, both as individuals and as a class, has unceasingly come to play a great part in modern states.”

These scientific men, Berthelot and Bernard, with whom Renan was on terms of friendship, had a large influence in the formation of his thought, after he had quitted the seminary and the Church. As a young man Renan possessed the positive spirit in a marked degree, and did not fail to disclose his enthusiasm for “Science” and for the scientific method. His book L’Avenir de la Science, which we have already noted, was written when he was only twenty-five, and under the immediate influence of the events of 1848, particularly the socialist spirit of Saint-Simon and the “organising” attitude of Auguste Comte. It did not, however, see publication until 1890, when the Empire had produced a pessimistic temper in him, later accentuated by the Commune and the Prussian War. The dominant note of the whole work is the touching and almost pathetic belief in Science, which leads the young writer to an optimism both in thought and in politics. “Science” constitutes for him the all-in-all. Although he had just previously abandoned the seminary, his priestly style remained with him to such a degree that even his treatment of science is characterised by a mixture of the unction of the curÉ and the subtilty of the dialectician. Levites were still to be necessary to the people of Israel, but they were to be the priests of the most High, whose name, according to Renan, was “Science.”

His ardour for Science is not confined to this one book: it runs through all his writings. Prospero, a character who personifies rational thought in L’Eau de Jouvence, one of Renan’s Drames philosophiques, expresses an ardent love for science continually. In his preface to Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse we find Renan upon the same theme. Quaintly enough he not only praises the objectivity which is characteristic of the scientific point of view, but seems to delight in its abstraction. The superiority of modern science consists, he claims, in this very abstraction. But he is aware that the very indefatigability with which we fathom nature removes us, in a sense, further from her. He recognises how science leads away from the immediacy of vital and close contact with nature herself. “This is, however, as it should be,” asserts Renan, “and let no one fear to prosecute his researches, for out of this merciless dissection comes life.” He does not stay to assure us, or to enlighten us, as to how that life can be infused into the abstract facts which have resulted from the process of dissection. Fruitful and suggestive as many of his pages are, they fail to approach the concrete difficulties which this passage mentions.

Writing from Dinant in Brittany in 1863 to his friend, Berthelot, Renan gives his view of the Sciences of Nature and the Historical Sciences. This letter, reprinted in his Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques, in 1876, expresses Renan’s.views in a clear and simple form upon the place of science in his mind and also upon the idea of progress, as for him the two are intimately connected. Extreme confidence is expressed in the power of science. Renan at this time had written, but not published, his Avenir de la Science. In a brief manner this letter summarises much contained in the larger work. The point of view is similar. Science is to be the great reforming power.

The word “Science” is so constantly upon Renan’s lips that we can see that it has become an obsession with mm to employ it, or a device. Certainly Renan’s extensive and ill-defined usage of it conceals grave difficulties. One is tempted frequently to regard it as a synonym for philosophy or metaphysics, a word which he dislikes. That does not, however, add to clearness, and Renan’s usage of “Science” as a term confuses both science and philosophy together. Even if this were not the case, there is another important point to note— namely, that even on a stricter interpretation Renan, by his wide use of the term, actually undermines the confidence in the natural sciences. For he embraces within the term “Science” not merely those branches of investigation which we term in general the sciences of nature, but also the critical study of language, of history and literature. He expressly endeavours to show in the letter to Berthelot that true science must include the product of man’s spirit and the record of the development of that spirit.

Renan assumed quite definitely a positivist attitude to metaphysics. “Philosophy,” he remarks, “is not a separate science; it is one side of every science. In the great optic pencil of human knowledge it is the central region where the rays meet in one and the same light.” Metaphysical speculation he scorned, but he admitted the place for a criticism of the human mind such as had been given by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason.

Kantian also, in its professions at least, was the philosophy of Vacherot, who stated that the aim of his work, La MÉtaphysique et la Science, was “the reconciliation of metaphysics with science.”^[14] These dialogues between a philosopher and a man of science, for of such discussions the book is composed, never really help us to get close to the problem, for Vacherot’s Kantianism is a profession which merely covers an actual positivism. His metaphysical doctrines are superimposed on a severe and rigid naturalism, but are kept from conflict with them, or even relation with them, by being allotted to a distant limbo of pure ideals, outside the world which science displays to us.

[14] See particularly his statements to this effect in his Preface, pp. xxxvii-xl.

Taine, in spite of his severely positive attitude, was a strong champion of metaphysics. The sciences needed, he claimed, a science of first principles, a metaphysic. Without it, “the man of science is merely a manoeuvre and the artist a dilettante.” The positive sciences he re- garded as inferior types of analysis. Above them “is a superior analysis which is metaphysics, and which reduces or takes up these laws of the sciences into a universal formula.” This higher analysis, however, does not give the lie to the others: it completes them.

It was indeed a belief and hope of Taine that the sciences will be more and more perfected until they can each be expressed in a kind of generic formula, which in turn may be capable of expression in some single formula. This single law is being sought by science and metaphysic, although it must belong to the latter rather than to the former. From it, as from a spring, proceeds, according to Taine, the eternal roll of events and the infinite sea of things.

Taine’s antagonism to the purely empirical schools centres round his conception of the law of causality. He disagrees with the assertion that this law is a synthetic, a posteriori judgment, a habit, as Hume said, or a mechanical attente, as Mill thought, or a generalisation of the sensation of effort which we feel in ourselves, as was suggested by Maine de Biran. Yet he also opposes Kant’s doctrine, in which causality is regarded as a synthetic a priori judgment. His own criticism of Hume and Kant was directed to denial of the elements of heterogeneity in experience, which are so essential to Hume’s view, and to a denial of the distinction maintained by Kant between logical and causal relations. Taine considered that all might be explained by logical relations, that all experience might some day be expressed in one law, one formula. The more geometrico of Spinoza and the “universal mathematic” of Descartes reappear in Taine. He even essays in L’Intelligence to equate the principle of causality (principe de raison explicative) with that of identity.

His attempt to reduce the principle of causality to that of identity did not succeed very well, and from the nature of the case this was to be expected. As FouillÉe well points out in his criticism of Taine, both in La LibertÉ et le DÉterminisme and the concluding pages of his earlier work on Plato,^[15] the notion of difference and heterogeneity which arises in the action of cause and effect can never be reducible to a mere identity, for the notion of identity has nothing in common with that of difference. Differences cannot be ignored; variety and change are undeniable facts of experience. FouillÉe here touches the weak spot of Taine’s doctrine. In spite of a seemingly great power of criticism there is an underlying dogmatism in his work, and the chief of those dogmas, which he does not submit to criticism, is the assertion of the universal necessity of all things. To this postulate he gives a false air of objectivity. He avoids stating why we do objectify causality, and he diverts discussion from the position that this postulate may itself be subjective.

[15] Vol. 4.

The particular bearing of Taine’s psychology upon the general problem of knowledge is interesting. He defines perception in L’Intelligence as une hallucination vraie. His doctrine of the “double aspect,” physical and mental, recalls to mind the Modes of Spinoza. In his attitude to the difficult problem of movement and thought he rests in the dualism of Spinoza, fluctuating and not enunciating his doctrine clearly. The primacy of movement to thought he abandoned as too mechanical a doctrine, and regarded the type of existence as mental in character. Taine thus passes from the materialism of Hobbes to the idealism of Leibnitz. “The physical world is reducible to a system of signs, and no more is needed for its construction and conception than the materials of the moral world.”

When we feel ourselves constrained to admit the necessity of certain truths, if we are inclined to regard this as due to the character of our minds themselves (notre structure mentale), as Kant maintained, Taine reminds us that we must admit that our mind adapts itself to its environment. He here adopts the view of Spencer, a thinker who seems to have had far more influence upon the Continent than in his own country. Although Taine thus reposes his epistemology upon this basis, he does not answer the question which the Kantian can still put to him—namely, “How do we know the structure of things?” He is unable to escape from the difficulty of admitting either that it is from experience, an admission which his anti-empirical attitude forbids him to make (and which would damage his dogma of universal logical necessity), or that our knowledge is obtained by analysing our own thoughts, in which case he leaves us in a vicious circle of pure subjectivity from which there is no means of escape.

The truth is that Taine vainly tried to establish a phenomenal doctrine, not purely empirical in character like that of Hume, but a phenomenalism wedded to a necessity which is supposed to be self-explanatory. Such a notion of necessity, however, is formal and abstract. Rather than accept Taine’s view of a law, a formula, an “eternal axiom” at the basis of things, we are obliged to postulate an activity, creative in character, of whose action universal laws are but expressions. Law, formula, axiom without action are mere abstractions which can of themselves produce nothing.

Taine’s positivism, however, was not so rigid as to exclude a belief in the value of metaphysics. It is this which distinguishes him from the Comtian School. We see in him the confidence in science complemented by an admission of metaphysics, equivalent to a turning of “positivism” in science and philosophy against itself. Much heavier onslaughts upon the sovereignty of science came, however, from the thinker who is the great logician and metaphysician of our period, Renouvier. To him and to Cournot we now turn.

II

While Taine had indeed maintained the necessity of a metaphysic, he shared to a large degree the general confidence in science displayed by Comte, Bernard, Berthelot and Renan. But the second and third groups of thinkers into which we have divided our period took up first a critical attitude to science and, finally, a rather hostile one.

Cournot marks the transition between Comte and Renouvier. His Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances et sur les CaractÈres de la Critique philosophique contains some very calm and careful thought on the relation of science and philosophy, which is the product of a sincere and well-balanced mind.^[16] He inherits from the positivists an intense respect for scientific knowledge, and remarks at the outset that he is hostile to any philosophy which would be so foolish as to attempt to ignore the work of the modern sciences.

[16] See in particular the second chapter of vol. 2, Du Contraste de la Science et de la Philosophie et de la Philosophie des Sciences, pp. 216-255.

His work MatÉrialisme, Vitalisme, Rationalisme is a striking example of this effort on Cournot’s part, being devoted to a study of the use which can be made in philosophy of the data afforded by the sciences. Somewhat after the manner of Comte, Cournot looks upon the various sciences as a hierarchy ranging from mathematics to sociology. Yet he reminds the scientists of the insufficiency of their point of view, for the sciences, rightly pursued, lead on to philosophy. He laments, however, the confusion of the two, and thinks that such confusion is “partly due to the fact that in the realm of speculations which are naturally within the domain of the philosopher, there are to be found here and there certain theories which can actually be reduced to a scientific form”^[17] He offers, as an instance of this, the theory of the syllogism, which has affinities to algebraical equations—but this interpenetration should not cause us, he argues, to abandon or to lose sight of the distinction between science and philosophy.

[17] Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances, vol. 2, p. 224.

This distinction, according to Cournot, lies in the fact that science has for its object that which can be measured, and that which can be reduced to a rigorous chain or connection. In brief, science is characterised by quantity. Philosophy, on the other hand, concerns itself with quality, for it endeavours not so much to measure as to appreciate.

Cournot reminds the apostles of science that quantity, however intimately bound up with reality it may be, is not the essence of that reality itself. He is afraid, too, that the neglect of philosophy by science may cause the latter to develop along purely utilitarian lines. As an investigation of reality, science is not ultimate. It has limits by the fact that it is concerned with measurement, and thus is excluded from those things which are qualitative and incapable of quantitative expression. Science, moreover, has its roots in philosophy by virtue of the metaphysical postulates which it utilises as its basis. Physics and geometry, Cournot maintains, both rest upon definitions which owe their origin to speculative thought rather than to experience, yet these sciences claim an absolute value for themselves and for those postulates as being descriptions of reality in an ultimate sense.

Following out his distinction between philosophy and the sciences, Cournot claims in a Kantian manner that while the latter are products of the human understanding the former is due to the operation of reason. This apparent dualism Cournot does not shrink from maintaining; indeed, he makes it an argument for his doctrine of discontinuity. The development of a science involves a certain breach with reality, for the progress of the science involves abstraction, which ever becomes more complicated. Cournot here brings out the point which we noticed was stressed by Renan.^[18]

[18] See above, p. 105.

Reason produces in us the idea of order, and this “idea of order and of reason in things is the basis of philosophic probability, of induction and analogy.”^[19] This has important bearings upon the unity of science and upon the conception of causality which it upholds. In a careful examination of the problems of induction and analogy, Cournot emphasises the truth that there are facts which cannot be fitted into a measured or logical sequence of events. Reality cannot be fitted into a formula or into concepts, for these fail to express the infinite variety and richness of the reality which displays itself to us. Science can never be adequate to life, with its pulsing spontaneity and freedom. It is philosophy with its vue d’ensemble which tries to grasp and to express this concreteness, which the sciences, bound to their systematic connection of events within separate compartments, fail to reach or to show us. Referring to the ideas of beauty and of goodness, Cournot urges a “transrationalism,” as he calls it, which, while loyal to the rational requirements of science, will enable us to take the wider outlook assumed by philosophy.^[20]

[19] Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances, p. 384.

[20] The parallelism of some of Cournot’s ideas here with those expressed by Bergson, although they have been enunciated by the later thinker in a more decided manner, is so obvious as hardly to need to be indicated.

Like Cournot, the author of the Essais de Critique gÉnÉrale was a keen antagonist of all those who sought to deify Science. It was indeed this which led Renouvier to give this title to his great work, the first part of which was published at a time when the confidence in Science appeared to be comparatively unassailed. We find him defending philosophy as against the scientists and others by an insistence upon its critical function.

In examining Comte’s positivism in his work Histoire et Solution des ProblÈmes mÉtaphysiques, Renouvier points out that its initial idea is a false one—namely, that philosophy can be constituted by an assembling together of the sciences.^[21] Such an assembly does not, he objects, make a system. Each science has its own postulates, its own data, and Science as a whole unity of thought or knowledge does not exist. He attacks at the same time the calm presumption of the positivist who maintains that the scientific stage is the final and highest development. Renouvier is considerably annoyed at this unwarranted dogmatism and assumed air of finality.

[21] Book X.: De l’Etat actuel de la Philosophie en France, chap. 1., De l’Aboutissement des Esprits au Positivisme, pp. 416-417.

Owing to the excellent training he had received at the Ecole Polytechnique, and by his own profound study, Renouvier was able on many technical points to meet the scientists on their own ground. His third Essai de Critique gÉnÉrale is devoted to a study of “the Principles of Nature,” in which he criticises many of the principles and assumptions of mechanism, while many pages of his two previous Essais are concerned with the discussion of questions intimately affecting the sciences.^[22]

[22] This is particularly noticeable in the matter printed as appendices to his chapters. (Cf. the Logic, vol 2.)

An important section of his second Essay, Psychologie rationnelle, deals with the “Classification of the Sciences.”^[23] Renouvier there points out that the attempt to classify the sciences in accordance with their degrees of certainty ends in failure. All of them, when loyal to their own principles, endeavour to display equal certainty. By loyalty Renouvier shows that he means adherence to an examination of certain classes of phenomena, the observation of facts and laws, with the proposal of hypotheses, put forward frankly as such. He draws a line between the logical and the physical sciences—a division which he claims is not only a division according to the nature of their data, but also according to method. Following another division, we may draw a line between sciences which deal with objects which are organic, living creatures, and those which are not.

[23] Vol. 2, chap. xviii., De la Certitude des Sciences et leur Classification rationnelle, pp. 139-186, including later observations on Spencer.

Renouvier’s line is not, it must be remembered in this connection, a purely imaginary one. It is a real line, an actual gap. For him there is a real discontinuity in the universe. Taine’s doctrine of a universal explanation, of a rigid unity and continuity, is, for Renouvier, anathema, c’est la mathÉmatisation a l’outrance. This appears most markedly in the pages which he devotes to the consideration of la synthÈse totale.

An important section of his TraitÉ de Logique (the first Essai de Critique gÉnÉrale) deals with the problem of this Total Synthesis of all phenomena.^[24] This is a conception which Renouvier affirms to be unwarrantable and, indeed, in the last analysis impossible. A general synthesis, an organisation or connected hierarchy of sciences, is a fond hope, an illusion only of a mind which can overlook the real discontinuity which exists between things and between groups of things.

[24] Vol. I, pp. 107-115, and also vol. 2, pp. 202-245.

He sees in it the fetish of the Absolute and the Infinite and the lure of pantheism, a doctrine to which he opposes his “Personalism.” He reminds the scientists that personality is the great factor to which all knowledge is related, and that all knowledge is relative. A law is a law, but the guarantee of its permanence is not a law. It is no more easy, claims Renouvier, to say why phenomena do not stop than it is to know why they have begun. Laws indeed abide, but “not apart from conscious personalities who affirm them.”^[25] Further, attacking the self-confident and dogmatic attitude in the scientists, Renouvier reminds them that it is impossible to demonstrate every proposition; and in an important note on “Induction and the Sciences”^[26] he points out that induction always implies a certain croyance. This is no peculiar, mystical thing; it is a fact, he remarks, which colours all the interesting acts of human personality. He here approaches Cournot in observing that all speculation is attended by a certain coefficient of doubt or uncertainty and so becomes really rational belief. With Cournot, too, Renouvier senses the importance of analogy and probability in connection with hypotheses in the world of nature and of morals. In short, he recognises as central the problem of freedom.

[25] Logique, vol. 2, p. 321.

[26] Note B to chap. xxxv. of the Logique, vol. 2, p. 13.

Renouvier attacks Comte’s classification or “hierarchy” of the sciences as mischievous and inexact. It is not based, he claims, upon any distinction in method, nor of data. It is not true that the sciences are arranged by Comte in an order where they successively imply one another, nor in an order in which they have come to be constituted as “positive”.^[27]

[27] This outburst of attack is a sample of Renouvier’s usual attitude to Positivism. (DeuxiÈme Essai, vol. 2, pp. 166-170.)

He justifies to the scientist the formulation of hypothesis as a necessary working method of co-ordinating in a provisional manner varying phenomena. Many hypotheses and inductions of science are, however, unjustifiable from a strictly logical standpoint, Renouvier reminds us. His chief objection, however, is that those hypotheses and inductions are put forward so frequently as certainties by a science which is dogmatic and surpasses its limits.

Science, Renouvier claims, does not give us a knowledge of the absolute, but an understanding of the relative. It is in the light of his doctrine of relativity and of the application of the law of number that he criticises many of the attitudes adopted by the scientists. Whatever savours of the Absolute or the Infinite he opposes, and his view of cause depends on this. He scorns the fiction of an infinite regress, and affirms real beginnings to various classes of phenomena. Causality is not to be explained, he urges in his Nouvelle Monadologie, save by a harmony. He differs from Leibnitz, however, in claiming in the interests of freedom that this harmony is not pre-established. In meeting the doctrine of the reduction of the complex to the simple, Renouvier cites the case of “reducing” sound, heat, light and electricity to movement. This may be superficially correct as a generality, but Renouvier aptly points out that it overlooks the fact that, although they may all be abstractly characterised as movement, yet there are differences between them as movements which correspond to the differences of sensation they arouse in us.

Renouvier upholds real differences, real beginnings, and, it must be added, a reality behind and beyond the appearances of nature. His Monadologie admits that “we can continue to explain nature mathematically and mechanically, provided we recognise that it is an external appearance—that thought, mind or spirit is at the heart of it.” This links Renouvier to the group of new spiritualists. His attitude to science is akin to theirs. He does not fear science when it confines itself to its proper limits and recognises these. It has no quarrel with philosophy nor philosophy with it. Advance in science involves, he believes, an advance also in theology and in metaphysics.

The sciences are responsible for working out the laws determining the development of the Universe. But between Science, an ideal unachieved, and the sciences which in themselves are so feeble, imperfect and limited, Renouvier claims that General Criticism, or Philosophy, has its place. “In spite of the discredit into which philosophy has fallen in these days, it can and ought to exist. Its object has been always the investigation of God, man, liberty, immortality, the fundamental laws of the sciences. ‘All these intimately connected and interpenetrating problems comprise the domain of philosophy.” In those cases where no science is possible, this seeming impossibility must itself be investigated, and philosophy remains as a “General Criticism” (Critique gÉnÉrale) of our knowledge. “It is this notion,” he says, “which I desired to indicate by banishing the word ‘Philosophy’ from the title of my Essays. The name ought to change when the method changes.”^[28] Thus Renouvier seeks to establish a “critique” midway between scepticism and dogmatism, and endeavours to found a philosophy which recognises at one and the same time the demands of science et conscience.

[28] Logique, vol. 2, p. 352.

III

On turning to the spiritualist current of thought we find it, like the neo-criticism, no less keen in its criticism of science. The inadequacy of the purely scientific attitude is the recurring theme from Ravaisson to Boutroux, Bergson and Le Roy. The attitude assumed by Ravaisson coloured the whole of the subsequent development of the new spiritualist doctrines, and not least their bearing upon the problem of science and its relation to metaphysics.

Mechanism, Ravaisson pointed out, quoting the classical author upon whom he had himself written so brilliantly (Aristotle), does not explain itself, for it implies a “prime mover,” not itself in motion, but which produces movement by spiritual activity. Ravaisson also refers to the testimony of Leibnitz, who, while agreeing that all is mechanical, carefully added to this statement one to the effect that mechanism itself has a principle which must be looked for outside matter and which is the object of metaphysical research. This spiritual reality is found only, according to Ravaisson, in the power of goodness and beauty—that is to say, in a reality which is not non-scientific but rather ultra-scientific. There are realities, he claims, to which science does not attain.

The explanation of nature presupposes soul or spirit. It is true, Ravaisson admits, that the physical and chemical sciences consider themselves independent of metaphysics; true also that the metaphysician in ignoring the study of those sciences omits much from his estimate of the spirit. Indeed, he cannot well dispense with the results of the sciences. That admission, however, does not do away with the possibility of a true “apologia” for metaphysics. To Newton’s sarcastic remark, “Physics beware of metaphysics,” Hegel replied cogently that this was equivalent to saying, “Physics, keep away from thought.” Spirit, however, cannot be omitted from the account; it is the condition of all that is, the light by which we see that there is such a thing as a material universe. This is the central point of Ravaisson’s philosophy. The sciences of nature may be allowed and encouraged to work diligently upon their own principles, but the very fact that they are individual sciences compels them to admit that they view the whole “piecemeal”. Philosophy seeks to interpret the whole as a whole. Ravaisson quotes Pascal’s saying, “Il faut avoir une pensÉe de derriÈre la tÊte et juger de tout par lÀ.” This pensÉe de derriÈre la tÊte, says Ravaisson, while not preventing the various sciences from speaking in their own tongue, is just the metaphysical or philosophical idea of the whole.

It is claimed, Aristotle used to say, that mathematics have absolutely nothing in common with the idea of the good. “But order, proportion, symmetry, are not these great forms of beauty?” asks Ravaisson. For him there is spirit at the heart of things, an activity, un feu primitif qui est l’Âme, which expresses itself in thought, in will and in love. It is a fire which does not burn itself out, because it is enduring spirit, an eternal cause, the absolute substance is this spiritual reality. Where the sciences fall short is that they fail to show that nature is but the refraction of this spirit. This is a fact, however, which both religion and philosophy grasp and uphold.

These criticisms were disturbing for those minds who found entire satisfaction in Science or rather in the sciences, but they were somewhat general. Ravaisson’s work inculcated a spirit rather than sustained a dialectic. Its chief value lay in the inspiration which it imparted to subsequent thinkers who endeavoured to work out his general ideas with greater precision.

It was this task which Lachelier set himself in his Induction. He had keenly felt the menace of science, as had Janet;^[29] he had appreciated the challenge offered to it by Ravaisson’s ideas. Moreover, Lachelier’s acute mind discovered the crucial points upon which the new spiritualism could base its attack upon the purely scientific dogmatism. Whatever Leibnitz might have said, creative spontaneity of the spirit, as it was acclaimed by Ravaisson, could not easily be fitted into the mechanism and determinism upheld by the sciences. Ravaisson had admitted the action of efficient causes in so far as he admitted the action of mechanism, which is but the outcome of these causes. In this way he endeavoured to satisfy the essential demands of the scientific attitude to the universe. But recognising the inadequacy of this attitude he had upheld the reality of final causes and thus opposed to the scientists a metaphysical doctrine akin to the religious attitude of Hellenism and Christianity.

[29] We refer here to the quotation from Janet’s ProblÈmes du XIX^e SiÈcle, given above on p. 95. Janet himself wrote on Final Causes but not Wlth the depth or penetration of Lachelier.

Lachelier saw that the important point of Ravaisson’s doctrine lay in the problem of these two types of causality. His thesis is therefore devoted to the examination of efficient and final causes. This little work of Lachelier marks a highly important advance in the development of the spiritualist philosophy. He clarifies and re-affirms more precisely the position indicated by Ravaisson. Lacheher tears up the treaty of compromise which was drafted by Leibnitz to meet the rival demands of science with its efficient causes and philosophy with its final causes. The world of free creative spontaneity of the spirit cannot be regarded, Lachelier claims (and this is his vital point), as merely the complement of, or the reflex from, the world of mechanism and determinism.

He works out in his thesis the doctrine that efficient causes can be deduced from the formal laws of thought. This was Taine’s position, and it was the limit of Taine’s doctrine. Lachelier goes further and undermines Taine’s theories by upholding final causes, which he shows depend upon the conception of a totality, a whole which is capable of creating its parts. This view of the whole is a philosophical conception to which the natural sciences never rise, and which they cannot, by the very nature of their data and their methods, comprehend. Yet it is only such a conception which can supply any rational basis for the unity of phenomena and of experience. Only by seeing the variety of all phenomena in the light of such an organic unity can we find any meaning in the term universe, and only thus, continues Lachelier, only on the principle of a rational and universal order and on the reality of final causes, can we base our inductions. The “uniformity of nature,” that fetish of the scientists which, as Lachelier well points out, is merely the empirical regularity of phenomena, offers no adequate basis for a single induction.

Lachelier developed his doctrines further in the article, Psychologie et MÉtaphysique. We can observe in it the marks which so profoundly distinguish the new spiritualism from the old, as once taught by Cousin. The old spiritualism had no place between its psychology and its metaphysics for the natural sciences. Indeed it was quite incapable of dealing with the problem which their existence and success presented, and so it chose to ignore them as far as possible. The new spiritualism, of which Lachelier is perhaps the profoundest speculative mind, not only is acquainted with the place and results of the sciences, but it feels itself equal to a criticism of them, an advance which marks a highly important development in philosophy.

In this article Lachelier endeavours to pass beyond the standpoint of Cousin, and in so doing we see not only the influence of Ravaisson’s ideas of the creative activity of the spirit, but also of the discipline of the Kantian criticism, with which Lachelier, unlike many of his contemporaries in France at that time, was well acquainted.

He first shows that the study of psychology reveals to us the human powers of sensation, feeling and will. These are the immediate data of consciousness. Another element, however, enters into consciousness, not as these three, a definite content, but as a colouring of the whole. This other element is “objectivity,” an awareness or belief that the world without exists and continues to exist independently of our observation of it. Lachelier combats, however, the Kantian conception of the “thing-in-itself.” If, he argues, the world around us appears as a reality which is independent of our perception, it is not because it is a “thing-in-itself,” but rather it appears as independent because we, possessing conscious intelligence, succeed in making it an object of our thought, and thus save it from the mere subjectivity which characterises our sense-experience. It is upon this fact, Lachelier rightly insists, that all our science reposes. A theory of knowledge as proposed by Taine, based solely on sensation and professing belief in hallucination vraie, is itself a contradiction and an abuse of language. “If thought is an illusion,” remarks Lachelier, “we must suppress all the sciences.”^[30]

[30] Psychologie et MÉtaphisique, p.151.(See especially the passages on pp.150-158.)

He then proceeds to show that if we admit thought to be the basis of our knowledge of the world, that is, of our sciences, then we admit that our sciences are themselves connstructions, based upon a synthetic, constructive, creative activity of our mind or spirit. For our thought is not merely another “thing” added to the world of things outside us. Our thought is not a given and predetermined datum, it is “a living dialectic,” a creative activity, a self-creative process, which is synthetic, and not merely analytic in character. “Thought,” he says, “can rest upon itself, while everything else can only rest upon it; the ultimate point d’appui of all truth and of all existence is to be found in the absolute spontaneity of the spirit.”^[31] Here, Lachelier maintains, lies the real a priori; here, too, is the very important passage from psychology to metaphysics.

[31] Psychologie et MÉtaphysique, p. 158.

Finally his treatment of the problems of knowledge and of the foundations of science leads him to reemphasise not only the reality of spirit but its spontaneity. He recognises with Cournot and Renouvier that the vital problem for science and philosophy is that of freedom. The nature of existence is for Lachelier a manifestation of spirit, and is seen in will, in necessity and in freedom. It is important to note that for him it is all these simultaneously. “Being,” he remarks in concluding his brilliant essay,^[32] “is not first, a blind necessity, then a will which must be for ever bound down in advance to necessity and, lastly, a freedom which would merely be able to recognise such necessity and such a bound will; being is entirely free, in so far as it is self-creative; it is entirely an expression of will, in so far as it creates itself in the form of something concrete and real; it is also entirely an expression of necessity, in so far as its self-creation is intelligible and gives an account of itself.”

[32] Ibid., p. 170.

At this stage something in the nature of a temporary “set-back” is given to the flow of the spiritualist current by Fouillee’s attitude, which takes a different line from that of Ravaisson and Lachelier. The attitude towards Science, which we find adopted by Fouillee, is determined by his two general principles, that of reconcilation, and his own doctrine of idÉes-forces. His conciliatory spirit is well seen in the fact that, although he has a great respect for science and inherits many of the qualities contained in Taine’s philosophy, particularly the effort to maintain a regular continuity and solidarity in the development of reality, nevertheless he is imbued with the spirit of idealism which characterises all this group of thinkers. The result is a mixture of Platonism and naturalism, and to this he himself confesses in his work, Le Mouvement idÉaliste et la RÉaction contre la Science positive, where he expresses a desire “to bring back Plato’s ideas from heaven to earth, and so to make idealism consonant with naturalism.”^[33]

[33] Le Mouvement idÉaliste el la RÉaction contre la Science positive, p. xxi.

FouillÉe claims to take up a position midway between the materialists and the idealists. Neither standpoint is, in his view, adequate to describe reality. He is particularly opposed to the materialistic and mechanistic thought of the English Evolutionary School, as presented by Spencer and Huxley, with its pretensions to be scientific. Fouillee accepts, with them, the notion of evolution, but he disagrees entirely with Spencer’s attempt to refer everything to mechanism, the mechanism of matter in motion. In any case, FouillÉe claims, movement is a very slender and one-sided element of experience upon which to base our characterisation of all reality, for the idea of motion arises only from our visual and tactual experience. He revolts from the epiphenomenalism of Huxley as from a dire heresy. Consciousness cannot be regarded as a mere “flash in the pan.” Even science must admit that all phenomena are to be defined by their relation to, and action upon, other phenomena. Consciousness, so regarded, will be seen, he claims, as a unique power, possessing the property of acting upon matter and of initiating movement. It is itself a factor, and a very vital one, in the evolutionary process. It is no mere reflex or passive representation. On this point of the irreducibility of the mental life and the validity of its action, FouillÉe parts company with Taine. On the other hand, he disagrees with the idealistic school of thought, which upholds a pure intellectualism and for whom thought is the accepted characterisation of reality. This, complains FouillÉe, is as much an abstraction and a one-sided view as that of Spencer.

In this manner FouillÉe endeavours to “rectify the scientific conception of evolution” by his doctrine of idÉes-forces. “There is,” he says,^[34] “in every idea a commencement of action, and even of movement, which tends to persist and to increase like an Élan. . . . Every idea is already a force.” Psychologically it is seen in the active, conative or appetitive aspect of consciousness. To think of a thing involves already, in some measure, a tendency toward it, to desire it. Physiologically considered, idÉes-forces are found to operate, not mechanically, but by a vital solidarity which is much more than mere mechanism, and which unites the inner consciousness to the outer physical fact of movement. From a general philosophical point of view the doctrine of idÉes-forces establishes the irreducibility of the mental, and the fact that, so far from the mental being a kind of phosphorescence produced as a result of the evolutionary process, it is a prime factor in that evolution, of which mechanism is only a symbol. Here FouillÉe rises almost to the spiritualism of Ravaisson. Mechanism, he declares, is, after all, but a manner of representing to ourselves things in space and time. Scientists speak of forces, but the real forces are ideas, and other so-called “forces” are merely analogies which we have constructed, based upon the inner mental feeling of effort, tendency, desire and will.^[35]

[34] La LibertÉ et le DÉterminisme, p. 97, 4e ed.

[35] This was a point upon which Maine de Biran had insisted. (See p. 20.)

The scientists have too often, as FouillÉe well points in his work on L’Evolutionnisme des IdÉes-forces, regarded the concept of Evolution as all-sufficing, as self-explanatory. Philosophy, however, cannot accept such dogmatism from science, and asserts that evolution is itself a result and not in itself a cause. With such a view FouillÉe is found ultimately in the line of the general development of the spiritual philosophy continuing the hostility to science as ultimate or all-sufficing. Further developments of this attitude are seen in Boutroux and in Bergson.

In the work of Boutroux we find a continuation of that type of criticism of science which was a feature in Ravaisson and Lachelier. He has also affinities with Renouvier (and, we may add, with Comte), because of his insistence upon the discontinuity of the sciences; upon the element of “newness” found in each which prevents the higher being deduced from the lower, or the superior explained by reference to the inferior. Boutroux opposes Spencer’s doctrines and is a keen antagonist of Taine and his claim to deduce all from one formula. Such a notion as that of Taine is quite absurd, according to Boutroux, for there is no necessary bond between one and another science. This is Boutroux’s main point in La Contingence des Lois de la Nature.

By a survey of laws of various types, logical, mathematical, mechanical, physical, chemical, biological, psychological and sociological, Boutroux endeavours to show that they are constructions built up from facts. Just as nature offers to the scientist facts for data, so the sciences themselves offer these natural laws as data to the philosopher, for his constructed explanation of things which is metaphysics or philosophy.

“In the actual condition of our knowledge,” he remarks, “science is not one, but multiple; science, conceived as embracing all the sciences, is a mere abstraction.” This is a remark which recalls Renouvier’s witty saying, “I should very much like to meet this person I hear so much about, called ‘science.’” We have only sciences, each working after its own manner upon a small portion of reality. Man has a thirst for knowledge, and he sees, says Boutroux, in the world an “ensemble” of facts of infinite variety. These facts man endeavours to observe, analyse, and describe with increasing exactness. Science, he points out, is just this description.

It is futile to attempt a resolution of all things into the principle of identity. “The world is full of a number of things,” and, therefore, argues Boutroux, the formula A = B can never be strictly and absolutely true. “Nature never offers to us identities, but only resemblances.” This has important bearing upon the law of causality, of which the sciences make so much. For there is such a degree of heterogeneity in the things to which the most elementary and general laws of physics and chemistry are applied that it is impossible to say that the consequent is proportional to the antecedent—that is to say, it is impossible to work out absolutely the statement that an effect is the unique result of a certain invariable cause. The fundamental link escapes us and so, for us, there is a certain contingency in experience. There is, further, a creativeness, a newness, which is unforeseeable. The passage from the inorganic to the organic stresses this, for the observation of the former would never lead us to the other, for it is a creation, a veritable “new” thing. Boutroux is here dealing hard blows at Taine’s conception. He continues it by showing that in the conscious living being we are introduced to a new element which is again absolutely irreducible to physical factors. Life, and consciousness too, are both creators. The life of the mind is absolutely sui generis; it cannot be explained by physiology, by reflex action, or looked upon as merely an epiphenomenon. Already Boutroux finds himself facing the central problem of Freedom. He recognises that as psychological phenomena appear to contain qualities not given in their immediate antecedents, the law of proportion of cause to effect does not apply to the actions of the human mind.

The principle of causality and the principle of the conservation of energy are m themselves scientific “shibboleths,” and neither of them, asserts Boutroux, can be worked out so absolutely as to justify themselves as ultimate descriptions of the universe. They are valuable as practical maxims for the scientist, whose object is to follow the threads of action in this varied world of ours. They are incomplete, and have merely a relative value. Philosophy cannot permit their application to the totality of this living, pulsing universe. For cause, we must remember, does not in its strictly scientific meaning imply creative power. The cause of a phenomenon is itself a phenomenon. “The positive sciences in vain pretend to seize the divine essence or reason behind things.”^[36] They arrive at descriptive formulÆ and there they leave us. But, as Boutroux well reminds us in concluding his thesis, formulas never explain anything because they cannot even explain themselves. They are simply constructions made by observation and abstraction and which themselves require explanation.

[36] Contingence des Lois de la Nature, p 154.

The laws of nature are not restrictions which have been, as it were, imposed upon her They are themselves products of freedom; they are, in her, what habits are to the individual. Their constancy is like the stability of a river-bed which the freely running stream at some early time hollowed out.

The world is an assembly of beings, and its vitality and nature cannot be expressed in a formula. It comprises a hierarchy of creatures, rising from inorganic to organic forms, from matter to spirit, and in man it displays an observing intelligence, rising above mere sensibility and expressly modifying things by free will. In this conception Boutroux follows Ravaisson, and he is also influenced by that thinker’s belief in a spiritual Power of goodness and beauty. He thus leads us to the sphere of religion and philosophy, both of which endeavour, in their own manner, to complete the inadequacy of the purely scientific standpoint. He thus stands linked up in the total development with Cournot and Renouvier, and in his own group with Lachelier, in regard to this question of the relation of philosophy and the sciences.

The critique of science, which is so prominent in Boutroux, was characteristic of a number of thinkers whom we cannot do more than mention here in passing, for in general their work is not in line with the spiritualist development, but is a sub-current running out and separated from the main stream. This is shown prominently in the fact that, while Boutroux’s critique is in the interests of idealism and the maintenance of some spiritual values, much subsequent criticism of science is a mere empiricism and, being divorced from the general principles of the spiritualist philosophy, tends merely to accentuate a vein of uncertainty—indeed, scepticism of knowledge. Such is the general standpoint taken by Milhaud, Payot, and Duhem. Rather apart from these stands the works of acute minds like PoincarÉ, Durand de Gros, and Hannequin, whose discussion of the atomic doctrines is a work of considerable merit. To these may be added Lalande’s criticism of the doctrine of evolution and integration by his opposing to it that of dissolution and disintegration. Passing references to these books must not, however, detain us from following the main development which, from Boutroux, is carried on by Bergson.

We find that Bergson, like Boutroux, holds no brief for science, and in particular he opposes some of its doctrines which have been dogmatically and uncritically accepted. His work, MatiÉre et MÉmoire, is a direct critique of the scientific postulate of psycho-physical parallelism which Bergson regards as the crux of the problem at issue between science and philosophy—namely, that of freedom. He shows that this theory, which has been adopted by science because of its convenience, ought not to be accepted by philosophy without criticism. In his opinion it cannot stand the criticism which he brings against it. A relation between soul and body is undeniable, but he does not agree that that relation is one of absolute parallelism. To maintain parallelism is to settle at once and beforehand, in an unwarrantably a priori manner, the whole problem of freedom. His intense spiritualism sees also in such a doctrine the deadly enemy Epiphenomenalism, the belief that the spiritual is only a product of the physical. He maintains the unique and irreducible nature of consciousness, and claims that the life of the soul or spirit is richer and wider than the mere physical activity of the brain, which is really its instrument. Bergson asks us to imagine the revolution which might have been, had our early scientists devoted themselves to the study of mind rather than matter, and claims that we suffer from the dogmatism of materialistic science and the geometrical and mathematical conceptions of “a universal science” or “mathematic” which come from the seventeenth century, and are seen later in Taine.

The inadequacy of the scientific standpoint is a theme upon which Bergson never tires of insisting. Not only does he regard a metaphysic as necessary to complete this inadequacy, but he claims that our intellect is incapable of grasping reality in its flux and change. The true instrument of metaphysics is, according to him, intuition. Bergson’s doctrine of intuition does not, however, amount to a pure hostility to intellectual constructions. These are valuable, but they are not adequate to reality. Metaphysics cannot dispense with the natural sciences. These sciences work with concepts, abstractions, and so suffer by being intellectual moulds. We must not mistake them for the living, pulsing, throbbing reality of life itself which is far wider than any intellectual construction.

By his insistence upon this point, in which he joins hands with several of his predecessors, Bergson claims to have got over the Kantian difficulties of admitting the value and possibility of a metaphysic. There is nothing irrational, he insists, in his doctrine of metaphysical intuition or “intellectual sympathy”; it is rather super-rational, akin to the spirit of the poet and the artist. The various sciences can supply data and, as such, are to be respected, for they have a relative value. What Bergson is eager to do is to combat their absolute value. His metaphysic is, however, no mere “philosophy of the sciences” in the sense of being a mere summary of the results of the sciences. His intuition is more than a mere generalisation of facts; it is an “integral experience,” a penetration of reality in its flux and change, a looking upon the world sub specie durationis. It is a vision, but it is one which we cannot obtain without intellectual or scientific labour. We can become better acquainted with reality only by the progressive development of science and philosophy. We cannot live on the dry bread of the sciences alone, an intuitional philosophy is necessary for our spiritual welfare. Science promises us well-being or pleasure, but philosophy, claims Bergson, can give us joy, by its intuitions, its super-intellectual vision, that vital contact with life itself in its fulness, which is far grander and truer than all the abstractions of science. This is the culmination of much already indicated in Cournot, Renouvier, Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux, which Bergson presents in a manner quite unique, thus closing in our period the development of that criticism and hostility to the finality and absoluteness of the purely scientific attitude which is so marked a feature of both our second and third groups, the neo-critical thinkers and the neo-spiritualists.

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Beginning with a glowing confidence in the sciences as ultimate interpretations of reality, we thus have witnessed a complete turn of the tide during the develop-* since 1851. Also, in following out the changes in the attitude adopted to Science, we have been enabled to discover in a general manner that the central and vital problem which our period presents is that of Freedom. It will be interesting to find whether in regard to this problem, too, a similar change of front will be noticeable as the period is followed to its close.

NOTE.—The reader may be interested to find that Einstein has brought out some of Boutroux’s points very emphatically, and has confirmed the view of geometry held by PoincarÉ. Compare the following statements:
Boutroux: “Mathematics cannot be applied with exactness to reality.” “Mathematics and experience can never be exactly fitted into each other.”
PoincarÉ: “FormulÆ are not true, they are convenient.”
Einstein: “If we deny the relation between the body of axiomatic Euclidean geometry or the practically rigid body of reality, we readily arrive at the view entertained by that acute and profound thinker, H. PoincarÉ . . . Sub specie Æterni, PoincarÉ, in my opinion, is right” (Sidelights on Relativity, pp. 33-35).