_La Science positive et la Métaphysique._ Par LOUIS LIARD,
Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux. (Ouvrage couronné
par l'Institut de France.) Paris, 1879.
For some years past there has been observable in France, outside of and
in opposition to Positivism, a growing movement in favour of idealism in
general, and of the critical idealism of Kant in particular. This
philosophy, which had previously found very few adherents in our
country, has now begun to make its way into our teaching and our
Universities. Berkeley and Kant have been the subjects of special works,
and an attempt has been made to translate and reproduce their ideas by
harmonizing them with the principal doctrines of spiritualism. We have
here a movement full of promise and well deserving of attention.[1]
Among the different productions affording some notion of this
philosophical tendency, we make choice--as being both the most recent
and the most complete--of a remarkable work, distinguished and crowned
by the French Institute, _Positive Science and Metaphysic_, by a young
and learned professor of Bordeaux, M. Louis Liard.
To begin with, M. Liard's work is well composed, its plan being simple,
severe, and lucid. It divides itself into three parts. The first is
devoted to determining the nature and limits of positive sciences--that
is, of the sciences properly so called--and to showing that they cannot
pretend to abolish or replace metaphysics. In this portion of his book
the author discusses the three forms of the experimental philosophy of
our day, namely--Positivism, the philosophy of association, and that of
evolution.
In the second part, the author examines what he calls Criticism--that is
to say, the philosophy of Kant. The preceding discussion having
demonstrated that the human mind is incapable of departing from certain
forms, certain laws, without which experience itself would be
impossible,--the author now resolves these into five fundamentals:
space, time, substance, cause, the Absolute. But are these forms or laws
of the mind the laws of things as well? Have they an objective
authority? We know that metaphysics hang upon the solution of this
question. We know, too, what is the solution given by Kant to this great
problem. In recognizing the necessary existence of these forms as laws
of the mind he disputes their external reality; hence he only admits
critical, not real and dogmatic metaphysic. Now, as regards this point
the author of the book under our notice, instead of dissenting from
Criticism as he had done from Positivism, appears on the contrary to
accept it by its own name, and to admire and endorse its conclusions. He
seems to grant or even to affirm that if Positivism is wrong, Criticism
is right, and that, strictly speaking, metaphysic is not a science.
And yet if metaphysic were not a science in the strict sense of the
word--that is to say, in the sense of objective sciences--would it
follow that it was nothing, or nothing more than criticism itself? By no
means: our author does not stop at that apparent solution; metaphysic
according to him has an object that criticism has not reached, has not
shaken; metaphysic has its own proper function, in which criticism can
never take its place. Only instead of founding it on the object, we must
found it on the subject. The mind must turn away from the external world
and re-enter itself. It is there that, without need of forms or
categories of which criticism has demonstrated the fallacy, the subject
grasps itself not only in its phenomena but in its being, and determines
itself in conformity to an end. This end is goodness: and this is the
only notion we can form to ourselves of the Absolute. Thus, metaphysic
is not the science of the object, but that of the subject; or if the
name of science be still withheld, it is at least the study of the
subject, and it is founded on and completed by morality. Thus, the
author ends by an evolution very similar to that of Kant, but with
certain differences which it will be our part to point out.
These constitute the three parts of the work. We will now take them up
in succession.