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.
* * * * * * * * *
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).
CHAPTER IV
FREEDOM
INTRODUCTORY: The central problem of our period—The reconciliation of
science with man’s beliefs centres around the question of
Freedom—Unsatisfactoriness of Kant’s solution felt.
I. The positivist belief in universal and rigid determinism, especially
shown in Taine. Renan’s view.
II. Cournot and Renouvier uphold Freedom—Strong logical and moral case
put forward for it.
III. The new spiritualists, Ravaisson and Lacheher, set Freedom in the
forefront of their philosophy—Fouillée attempts a reconciliation by the
idea of Freedom as a determining force—Guyau, Boutroux, Blondel and
Bergson insist on the reality of Freedom—They surpass Cournot and
Renouvier by upholding contingency —This is especially true of Guyau,
Boutroux and Bergson.
Belief in creativeness and spontaneity replace the older belief in
determinism.
CHAPTER IV
FREEDOM
The discussions regarding the relation between science and philosophy
led the thinkers of our period naturally to the crucial problem of
freedom. Science has almost invariably stood for determinism, and men
were becoming impatient of a dogmatism which, by its denial of freedom,
left little or no place for man, his actions, his beliefs, his moral
feelings.
“_La nature fatale offre à la Liberté
Un problème_.”[1]
[1] Guyau, in his _Vers d’un Philosophe_, “_Moments de Foi_—I.,” _En
lisant Kant_, p. 57.
It was precisely this problem which was acutely felt in the philosophy
of our period as it developed and approached the close of the century.
In a celebrated passage of his _Critique of Judgment_ the philosopher
Kant had drawn attention to the necessity of bringing together the
concept of freedom and the concept of nature as constructed by modern
science, for the two were, he remarked, separated by an abyss. He
himself felt that the realm of freedom should exercise an influence
upon the realm of science, but his own method prohibited his attempting
to indicate with any preciseness what that influence might be. The
fatal error of his system, the artificial division of noumena and
phenomena, led him to assign freedom only to the world of noumena.
Among phenomena it had no place, but reigned transcendent, unknown and
unknowable, beyond the world we know.
The artificiality of such a solution was apparent to the thinkers who
followed Kant, and particularly was this felt in France. “Poor
consolation is it,” remarked Fouillée, in reply to Kant’s view, “for a
prisoner bound with chains to know that in some unknown realm afar he
can walk freely devoid of his fetters.”
The problem of freedom, both in its narrow sphere of personal free-will
and in its larger social significance, is one which has merited the
attention of all peoples in history. France, however, has been
pre-eminently a cradle for much acute thought on this matter. It loomed
increasingly large on the horizon as the Revolution approached, it
shone brilliantly in Rousseau. Since the Revolution it has been equally
discussed, and is the first of the three watchwords of the republic,
whose philosophers, no less than its politicians, have found it one of
their main themes.
The supreme importance of the problem of freedom in our period was due
mainly to the need felt by all thinkers for attempting, in a manner
different from that of Kant, a reconciliation between science and
morals (_science et conscience_), and to find amid the development of
scientific thought a place for the personality of the thinker himself,
not merely as a passive spectator, but as an agent, a willing and
acting being. Paul Janet, in his essays entitled _Problèmes du XIXe
Siècle_,[2] treating the question of science, asks whether the growing
precision of the natural sciences and “the extension of their
‘positive’ methods, which involve a doctrine or assumption of
infallible necessity, do not imperil gravely the freedom of the moral
agent?” While himself believing that, however closely the sciences may
seem to encroach upon the free power of the human soul, they will only
approach in an indefinite “asymptote,” never succeeding in annulling
it, he senses the importance of the problem. Science may endeavour to
tie us down to a belief in universal and rigid determinism, but the
human spirit revolts from the acceptance of such a view, and acclaims,
to some degree at least, the reality of a freedom which cannot be
easily reconciled with the determinist doctrines.
[2] Published in 1872.
In the period which we have under review the central problem is
undoubtedly that of freedom. Practically all the great thinkers in
France during this period occupied themselves with this problem, and
rightly so, for they realised that most of the others with which
philosophy concerns itself depend in a large degree upon the attitude
adopted to freedom. Cournot, Renouvier, Ravaisson, Lachelier, Fouillée,
Boutroux, Blondel and Bergson have played the chief part in the arena
of discussion, and although differing considerably in their methods of
treatment and not a little in the form of their conclusions, they are
at one in asserting the vital importance of this problem and its
primacy for philosophy. The remark of Fouillée is by no means too
strong: “The problem which we are going to discuss is not only a
philosophical problem; it is, _par excellence_, _the_ problem for
philosophy. All the other questions are bound up with this.”[3] This
truth will be apparent when, after showing the development of the
doctrines concerning freedom, we come, in our subsequent chapters, to
consider its application to the questions of progress, of ethics and of
the philosophy of religion.
[3] In his preface to his Thesis _Liberté et Déterminisme_, later
editions, p. vii.
I
We find in the thought of our period a very striking development or
change in regard to the problem of freedom. Beginning with a strictly
positivist and naturalist belief in determinism, it concludes with a
spiritualism or idealism which not only upholds freedom but goes
further in its reaction against the determinist doctrines by
maintaining contingency.
Taine and Renan both express the initial attitude, a firm belief in
determinism, but it is most clear and rigid in the work of Taine. His
whole philosophy is hostile to any belief in freedom. The strictly
positivist, empiricist and naturalist tone of his thought combined with
the powerful influence of Spinoza’s system to produce in him a firm
belief in necessity—a necessity which, as we have seen, was severely
rational and of the type seen in mathematics and in logic. Although it
must also be admitted that in this view of change and development Taine
was partly influenced by the Hegelian philosophy, yet his formulations
were far more precise and mathematical than those of the German
thinker.
We have, in considering his attitude to science, seen the tenacious
manner in which he clings to his dogma of causality or universal
necessity. All living things, man included, are held in the firm grip
of “the steel pincers of necessity.” Every fact and every law in the
universe has its _raison explicative_, as Taine styles it. He quotes
with approval, in his treatment of this question at the close of his
work _De l’Intelligence_, the words of the great scientist and
positivist Claude Bernard: “_Il y a un déterminisme absolu, dans les
conditions d’existence des phénomènes naturels, aussi bien pour les
corps vivants que pour les corps bruts_.”[4] In Taine and the school of
scientists like Bernard, whose opinions on this matter he voices, no
room is accorded to freedom.
[4] _De l’Intelligence_, vol. 2, p. 480, the quotation from Bernard is
to be found in his _Introduction à l’Etude de la Médecine
expérimentale_, p. 115.
Taine’s belief in universal necessity and his naturalistic outlook led
him to regard man from the physical standpoint as a mechanism, from the
mental point of view a theorem. Vice and virtue are, to quote his own
words, “products just as vitriol or sugar.” This remark having appeared
to many thinkers a scandalous assertion, Taine explained in an article
contributed to the _Journal des Débats_[5] that he did not mean to say
that vice and virtue were, like vitriol or sugar, _chemical_ but they
are nevertheless products, _moral_ products, which moral elements bring
into being by their assemblage. And, he argues, just as it is necessary
in order to make vitriol to know the chemical elements which go to its
composition, so in order to create in man the hatred of a lie it is
useful to search for the psychological elements which, by their union,
produce truthfulness.
[5] On December 19th, 1872.
Even this explanation of his position, however, did not prevent the
assertion being made that such a view entirely does away with all
question of moral responsibility. To this criticism Taine objected. “It
does not involve moral indifference. We do not excuse a wicked man
because we have explained to ourselves the causes of his wickedness.
One can be determinist with Leibnitz and nevertheless admit with
Leibnitz that man is responsible —that is to say, that the dishonest
man is worthy of blame, of censure and punishment, while the honest man
is worthy of praise, respect and reward.”
In one of his _Essais_ Taine further argued in defence of his doctrine
of universal determination that since WE ourselves are determined—that
is to say, since there is a psychological determinism as well as a
physical determinism—we do not feel the restriction which this
determinism implies, we have the illusion of freedom and act just as if
we were free. To this Fouillée replied that the value of Taine’s
argument was equal to that of a man who might say, “Because _I_ am
asleep, all of me, all my powers and faculties, therefore I am in a
state where I am perfectly free and responsible.” Certainly Taine’s
remark that _we_ are determined had nothing in common with the belief
in that true determinism, which is equally true freedom, since it is
_self_-determination. Taine professed no such doctrine, and rested in a
purely naturalistic fatalism, built upon formulæ of geometry and logic,
in abstraction from the actual living and acting of the soul, and this
dogma of determinism, to which he clung so dearly, colours his view of
ethics and of history. For Taine, “the World is a living geometry” and
“man is a theorem that walks.”
Like Taine, Renan set out from the belief in universal causation, but
he employed the conception not so much in a warfare against man’s
freedom of action as against the theologians’ belief in miracle and the
supernatural. There is none of Taine’s rigour and preciseness in Renan,
and it is difficult to grasp his real attitude to the problem of
freedom. If he ever had one, may be doubted. The blending of
viewpoints, the paradox so characteristic of him, seems apparent even
in this question.
His intense humanism prompted him to remarks in praise of freedom, and
he seems to have recognised in man a certain power of freedom; but in
view of his belief in universal cause he is careful to qualify this.
Further, his intensely religious mind remained in love with the
doctrine of divine guidance which is characteristic of Christian and
most religious thought. Although Renan left the Church, this belief
never left Renan. He sees God working out an eternal purpose in
history, and this he never reconciled with the problem of man’s free
will. The humanist in him could remark that the one object of life is
the development of the mind, and the first condition for this is
freedom. Here he appears to have in view freedom from political and
religious restrictions. He is thinking of the educational problem. His
own attitude to the ultimate question of freedom in itself, as opposed
to determinism, is best expressed in his _Examen d’une Conscience
philosophique_. He there shows that the universe is the result of a
lengthy development, the. beginnings of which we do not know. “In the
innumerable links of that chain,” says Renan, “we find not one free act
before the appearance of man, or, if you like, living beings.” With
man, however, freedom comes into the scheme of things. A free cause is
seen employing the forces of nature for willed ends. Yet this is but
nature itself blossoming to self-consciousness; this free cause
emanates from nature itself. There is no rude break between man with
his free power and unconscious nature. Both are interconnected. Freedom
is indeed the appearance of something “new,” but it is not, insists
Renan, something divorced from what has gone before.
We see in Renan a rejection of the severely deterministic doctrine of
Taine, but it is by no means a complete rejection or refutation of it.
Renan adheres largely to the scientific and positivist attitude which
is such a feature of Taine’s work. His humanism, however, recognises
the inadequacy of such doctrines and compels him to speak of freedom as
a human factor, and he thus brings us a step nearer to the development
of the case for freedom put forward so strongly by Cournot and
Renouvier and by the neo-spiritualists.
II
A very powerful opposition to all doctrines based upon or upholding
determinism shows itself in the work of Cournot and the neo-critical
philosophy. The idea of freedom is a central one in the thought of both
Cournot and Renouvier.
Cournot devoted his early labours to a critical and highly technical
examination of the question of probability, considered in its
mathematical form, a task for which he was well equipped.[6] Being not
only a man of science but also a metaphysician, or rather a philosopher
who approached metaphysical problems from the impulse and data accorded
him by the sciences, Cournot was naturally led to the wider problem of
_probabilité philosophique_. He shows in his _Essai sur les Fondements
de nos Connaissances_ that hazard or chance are not merely words which
we use to cover our ignorance, as Taine would have claimed. Over
against the doctrine of a universal determinism he asserts the reality
of these factors. The terms chance and hazard represent a real and
vital element in our experience and in the nature of reality itself.
Probability is a factor to be reckoned with, and this is so because of
the elements of contingency in nature and in life. Freedom is bound up
essentially with the vitality which is nature itself.
[6] See his _Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances: “Hazard,”_
chap. iii.; “_Probabilité Philosophique_,” chap, iv., pp. 71-101; and
chap. v., “_De l’Harmonie et de la Finalité_,” pp. 101-144.
The neo-critical philosopher, Renouvier, is a notable champion of
freedom. We have already seen the importance he attaches to the
category of personality. For him, personality represents a
consciousness in possession of itself, a free and rational harmony—in
short, freedom personified.
From a strictly demonstrative point of view Renouvier thinks it is
impossible to prove freedom as a fact. However, he lays before us with
intense seriousness various. considerations of a psychological and a
moral character which have an important bearing upon the problem. This
problem, he asserts, not only concerns our actions but also our
knowledge. To bring out this point clearly, Renouvier develops some of
the ideas of his friend, Jules Lequier, on the notion of the autonomy
of the reason, or rather of the reasonable will. In this way he shows
doubt and criticism to be themselves signs of freedom, and asserts that
we form our notions of truth freely, or that at least they are
creations of our free thought, not laid upon us by an external
authority.
More light is thrown on the problem by considering what Renouvier calls
_vertige mental_, a psychopathological condition due to a disturbance
of the rational harmony or self-possession which constitutes the
essence of the personal consciousness. This state is characterised by
hallucination and error. It is the extreme opposite of the
self-conscious, reflective personality in full possession of itself and
exercising its will rationally. Renouvier shows that between these two
extremes there are numerous planes of _vertige mental_ in which the
part played by our will is small or negligible, and we are thus victims
of habit or tendency. Is there, then, any place for freedom? There most
certainly is, says Renouvier, for our freedom manifests itself whenever
we inhibit an action to which we are excited by habit, passion or
imagination. Our freedom is the product of reflection. We are at
liberty to be free, to determine ourselves in accordance with higher
motives. This power is just our personality asserting itself, and it
does not contradict our being, more often than not, victims of habit.
We have it in our power to make fresh beginnings. Renouvier’s disbelief
in strict continuity is here again apparent. We must admit freedom of
creation in the personality itself, and not seek to explain our actions
by trying to ascend some scale of causes to infinity. There is no such
thing as a sum to infinity of a series; there is no such thing as the
influence of an infinite series of causes upon the performance of a
consciously willed act in which the personality asserts its initiative—
that is, its power of initiation of a new series, in short, its
freedom.
Passing from these psychological considerations, Renouvier calls our
attention to some of a moral nature, no less important, in his opinion,
for shedding light upon the nature of freedom. If, he argues, all is
necessary, if all human actions are predetermined, then popular
language is guilty of a grave extravagance and appears ridiculous,
insinuating, as it does, that many acts might have been left undone and
many events might have occurred differently, and that a man might have
done other than he did. In the light of the hypothesis of rigorous
necessity, the mention of ambiguous futures and the notion of “being
otherwise” (_le pouvoir être autrement_) seem foolish. Science may
assert the docrine of necessity and preach it valiantly, but the human
conscience feels it to be untrue and will not be gainsaid. The
scientist himself is forced to admit that man does not accept his
gospel of universal predestination or fatalism. This Renouvier
recognises as an important point in the debate. Strange, is it not, he
remarks, that the mind of the philosopher himself, a sanctuary or
shrine for truth, should appear as a rebellious citadel refusing to
surrender to the truth of this universal necessity. We believe
ourselves to be free agents or, at least beings who are capable of some
free action. However slight such action, it would invalidate the
hypothesis of universal necessity.
If all things are necessitated, then moral judgments, the notions of
right and of duty, have no foundation in the nature of things. Virtue
and crime lose their character; the sentiments and feelings, such as
regret, hope, fear, desire, change their meaning or become meaningless.
Renouvier lays great stress upon these moral considerations.
Again, if everything be necessitated, error is as necessary as truth.
The false is indeed true, being necessary, and the true may become
false. Disputes rage over what is false or true, but these disputes
cannot be condemned, for they themselves are, by virtue of the
hypothesis, necessary, and the disputes are necessarily absurd and
ridiculous from this point of view. Where then is truth? Where is
morality? We have here no basis for either. Looking thus at history,
all its crimes and infamies are equally lawful, for they are
inevitable; such is the result, Renouvier shows, of viewing all human
action as universally predetermined.
The objections thus put forward by Renouvier against the doctrine of
universal necessity are powerful ones. They possess great weight and
result in the admission, even by its upholders, that “the judgment of
freedom is a natural datum of consciousness and is bound up with our
reflective judgments upon which we act, being itself the foundation of
these.”
Yet, we have, Renouvier reminds us, no logical proof of the reality of
freedom. We feel ourselves moved, spontaneously and unconstrained. The
future, in so far as it depends upon ourselves, appears not as
prearranged but ambiguous, open.[7] Whether our judgment be true or
false, we in practical life act invariably on the belief in freedom.
That, of course, as Renouvier admits at this stage of his discussion,
does not prove that our belief is not an illusion. It is a feeling,
natural and spontaneous.
[7] Cf., later, Bergson’s remark: “The portals of the future stand
wide open, the future is being made.”
One of the most current forms of the doctrine of freedom has been that
known as the “liberty of indifference.” The upholders of this theory
regard the will as separated from motives and ends. The operation of
the will is regarded by them as indifferent to the claims or influence
of reason or feeling. Will is superadded externally to motives, where
such exist, or may be superimposed on intellectual views even to the
extent of annulling these. Judgment and will are separated in this
view, and the will is a purely arbitrary or indifferent factor. It can
operate without reason against reason. The opponents of freedom find
little difficulty in assailing this view, in which the will appears to
operate like a dice or a roulette game, absolutely at hazard, reducing
man to a non-rational creature. Such a type of will, however, Renouvier
declares to be non-existent, for every man who has full consciousness
of an act of his has at the same time a consciousness of an end or
purpose for this act, and he proposes to realise by this means a good
which he regards as preferable to any other. In so far as he has doubts
of this preference the act and the judgment will be suspended. He must,
however, if he be an intelligent being, pursue what he deems to be his
good—that is to say, what he deems to be good at the time of acting.
Renouvier here agrees with Socrates and Plato in the view that no man
deliberately and knowingly wills what he considers to be evil or to be
bad for him. Virtue involves knowledge, and although there is the
almost proverbial phrase of Ovid and of Paul, about seeing and
approving the better, yet nevertheless doing the worse, it is a general
statement which does not express an antithesis as present to
consciousness at the time of action. The agent may afterwards say
. . . “_Video meliora proboque
deteriora sequor_.”
but at the time of action “the worse” must appear to him as a good, at
any rate then and in his own judgment. Further, beyond these
psychological considerations there are grave moral objections,
Renouvier points out, to admitting “an indifferent will,” for the acts
of such a will being purely arbitrary and haphazard, the man will be no
moral agent, no responsible person. A man who wills apart from the
consideration of any motive whatever can never perform any meritorious
action. Under the conception of an indifferent will the term “merit”
ceases to have a meaning. The theologians who have asserted the
doctrine (indeed, it seems to have originated, Renouvier thinks, with
them) have readily admitted this point, for it opens up the way for
their theory of divine grace or the good will of God acting directly
upon or within the agent. Will and merit are for them quite separate,
the latter being due to the mystical operations of divine favour or
grace, in honour of which the indifference of the will has been
postulated. Philosophers not given to appeals to divine grace, who have
upheld the doctrine of the indifferent will, have really been less
consistent than the theoloians and have fallen into grave error.
Renouvier appeals to the testimony of the penal laws of all nations in
favour of his criticism of an indifferent will. Motive _is_ deemed a
real factor, for men are not deemed to have acted indifferently. Some
deliberation, indeed, is implied in all action which is conscious and
human, some comparison of motives and a conscious, decision. The values
of truth, as well as those of morality are equally fatal to the
indifferentist; for, asks Renouvier, is a man to be regarded as not
determined to affirm as true what he judges to be true?
The doctrine of freedom as represented by that of an indifferent will
is no less vicious, Renouvier affirms, than the opposing doctrine of
universal necessity. The truth is that they both rest on fictions.
“Indifferentism” imagines a will divorced from judgment, separated from
the rational man himself, an unseizable power, a mysterious absolute
cause unconnected with reflection or deliberation, a mere chimera. For
determinism the will is equally a fiction.
A way out of this difficulty is to be found, according to Renouvier, in
viewing the will in a manner different from that of the
“indifferentists.” Let us suppose the will bound up with motive, a
motive drawn from the intellectual and moral equipment of the man.
This, however, gives rise to psychological determinism. The will, it is
argued, follows always the last determination of the understanding.
Greater subtilty attends on this argument against freedom than those
put forward on behalf of physical determinism. Renouvier sees that
there is no escape from such a doctrine as psychological determinism
unless we take a view of the will as bound up with the nature of man as
a whole, with his powers of intellect and feeling. Such a will cannot
be characterised as indifferent or as the mere resultant of motives.
The Kantian element in Renouvier’s thought is noticeable in the strong
moral standpoint from which he discusses all problems, and this is
particularly true of his discussion of this very vital one of freedom.
He is by no means, however, a disciple of Kant, and he joins battle
strongly with the Kantian doctrine of freedom. This is natural in view
of his entire rejection of Kant’s “thing-in-itself,” or noumena, and it
follows therefrom, for Kant attached freedom only to the noumenal
world, denying its operation in the world of phenomena. The rejection
of noumena leaves Renouvier free to discuss freedom in a less remote or
less artificial manner than that of Kant.
If it be true, argues Renouvier, that necessity rules supreme, then the
human spirit can find peace in absolute resignation; and in looking
back over the past history of humanity one need not have different
feelings from those entertained by the geologist or paleontologist.
Ethics, politics and history thus become purely “natural” sciences (if
indeed ethics could here have meaning, would it not be identical with
anthropology? At any rate, it would be purely positive. A normative
view of ethics would be quite untenable in the face of universal
necessity). Any inconvenience, pain or injustice would have to be
accepted and not even named “evil,” much less could any effort be truly
made to expel it from the scheme of things. To these accusations the
defenders of necessity object. The practical man, they say, need not
feel this, in so far as he is under the illusion of freedom and unaware
of the rigorous necessity of all things. He need not refrain from
action.
But this defence of necessity leads those who wish to maintain the case
against it to continue the argument. Suppose that the agent does _not_
forget that all is necessitated, what then? Under no illusion of the
idea of freedom, he then acts at every moment of his existence in the
knowledge that he cannot but do what he is doing, he cannot but will
what he wills, he cannot but desire what he desires. In time this must
produce, says Renouvier, insanity either of an idle type or a furious
kind, he will become an indifferent imbecile or a raving fanatic, in
either case a character quite abnormal and dangerous. These are extreme
results, but between the two extremes all degrees of character are to
be, found. The most common type of practical reason presents an
antinomy in the system of universal necessity. The case for necessity
must reckon with this fact—namely, that the operation of necessity has
itself given rise to ethics which exists, and, according to the case,
its existence is a necessary one; yet ethics constitutes itself in
opposition to necessity, and under the sway of necessity is quite
meaningless. Here is a paradox which is not lessened if we suppose the
ethical position to be an absurd and false one. Whether false or not,
morality in some form is practically as universal as human nature. That
nature, Renouvier insists, can hardly with sincerity believe an
hypothesis or a dogma which its own moral instincts belie continually.
If, on the other hand, truth lies with the upholders of freedom, then
man’s action is seen to have great value and significance, for man then
appears as creating a new order of things in the world. His new acts,
Renouvier admits, will not be without preceding ones, without roots or
reasons, but they will be without _necessary_ connection with the whole
scheme of things. He is thus creating a new order; he is creating
himself and making his own history. Conscious pride or bitter remorse
can both alike be present to him. The great revolutions of history will
be regarded by him not as mystical sweepings of some unknown force
external to himself, but as results of the thought and work of humanity
itself. A philosophy which so regards freedom will thus be a truly
“human” philosophy. Renouvier rightly recognises that the whole
philosophy of history turns upon the attitude which we adopt to
freedom.
In view of the many difficulties connected with the problem of freedom
many thinkers would urge us to a compromise. Renouvier is aware of the
dangers of this attitude, and he brings into play against it his
logical method of dealing with problems. This does not contradict his
statement about the indemonstrability of freedom, nor does it minimise
the weight and significance of the moral case for freedom: it
complements it. Between contradictories or incompatible propositions no
middle course can be followed. Freedom and necessity cannot be both at
the same time true, or both at the same time false, for of the two
things one must be true—namely, either human actions are all of them
totally predetermined by their conditions or antecedents, or they are
not all of them totally predetermined. It is to this pass that we are
brought in the logical statement of the case. Now sceptics would here
assert that doubt was the only solution. This would not realh be a
solution, and however legitimate doubt is in front of conflicting
theories, it involves the death of the soul if it operates in practical
affairs and in any circumstances where some belief is absolutely
necessary to the conduct of life and to action.
The freedom in question, as Renouvier is careful to remind us, does not
involve our maintaining the total indetermination of things or denial
of the operations of necessity within limits. Room is left for freedom
when it is shown that this necessity is not universal. Many
consequences of free acts may be necessitated. For example, says
Renouvier, I have a stone in my hand. I can freely will to hurl it
north or south, high or low, but once thrown from my hand its path is
strictly determined by the law of gravity. The voluntary movement of a
man on the earth may, however slightly, alter the course of a distant
planet. Freedom, we might say, operates in a sphere to which necessity
supplies the matter. Ultimately any free act is a choice between two
alternatives, equally possible, but both necessitated as possibilities.
The points of free action may seem to take up a small amount of room in
the world, so to speak, but we must realise how vital they are to any
judgment regarding its character, and how tremendously important they
are from a moral point of view. So far, claims Renouvier, from the
admittance of freedom being a destruction of the laws of the universe,
it really shows us a special law of that universe, not otherwise to be
explained—namely, the moral law. Freedom is thus regarded by Renouvier
as a positive fact, a moral certainty.
Freedom is the pillar of the neo-critical philosophy; it is the first
truth involved at once in all action and in all knowledge. Truth and
error are not well explained, or, indeed, at all explained, by a
doctrine which, embracing them both as equally necessary, justifies
them equally, and so in a sense verifies both of them. It was this
point which Brochard developed in his work _L’Erreur_, which has
neo-critical affinities. Man is only capable of science because he is
free; it is also because he is free that he is subject to error.[8]
Renouvier claims that “we do not avoid error always, but we always
_can_ avoid it.”[9] Truth and error can only be explained, he urges, by
belief in the ambiguity of futures, movements of thought involving
choice between opinions which conflict—in short, by belief in freedom.
The calculation of probabilities and the law of the great numbers
demonstrates, Renouvier claims, the indetermination of futures, and
consciousness is aware of this ambiguity in practical life. This belief
in the ambiguity of futures is a condition, he shows, of the exercise
of the human consciousness in its moral aspect, and this consciousness
in action regards itself as suspended before indetermination—that is,
it affirms freedom. This affirmation of freedom Renouvier asserts to be
a necessary element of any rational belief whatever. It alone gives
moral dignity and supremacy to personality, whose existence is the
deepest and most radical of all existences. The personal life in its
highest sense and its noblest manifestation is precisely Freedom.
Renouvier assures us that there is nothing mysterious or mystical about
this freedom. It is not absolute liberty and contingency of all things;
it is an attribute of persons. The part played thus freely by
personality in the scheme or order of the universe proves to us that
that order or scheme is not defined or formed in a predetermined
manner; it is only in process of being formed, and our personal efforts
are essential factors in its formation. The world is an order which
becomes and which is creating itself, not a pre-established order which
simply unrolls itself in time. For a proper understanding of the nature
of this problem “we are obliged to turn to the practical reason. It is
a moral affirmation of freedom which we require; indeed, any other kind
of affirmation would, Renouvier maintains, presuppose this. The
practical reason must lay down its own basis and that of all true
reason, for reason is not divided against itself reason is not
something apart from man; it is man, and man is never other than
practical—_i.e._, acting.”[10] Considered from this standpoint there
are four cases which present themselves to the tribunal of our
judgment—namely, the case for freedom, the case against freedom, the
case for necessity and the case against necessity.
[8] _De L’Erreur_, p. 47.
[9] _Psychologie rationnelle_, vol. 2, p. 96.
[10] _Psychologie rationnelle_, vol. 2, p 78.
The position is tersely put in the Dilemma presented by Jules Lequier,
the friend of Renouvier, quoted in the _Psychologie rationnelle_. There
are four possibilities:
To affirm necessity, necessarily. To affirm necessity, freely. To
affirm freedom, necessarily. To affirm freedom, freely.
On examining these possibilities we find that to affirm necessity,
necessarily, is valueless, for its contradictory, freedom, is equally
necessary. To affirm necessity, freely, does not offer us a better
position, for here again it is necessity which is affirmed. If we
affirm freedom necessarily, we are in little better case, for necessity
operates again (although Renouvier notes that this gives a certain
basis for morality). In the free affirmation of freedom, however, is to
be found not only a basis for morals, but also for knowledge and the
search for truth. Indeed, as we are thus forced “to admit the truth of
either necessity or freedom, and to choose between the one and the
other with the one or with the other,”[11] we find that the affirmation
of necessity involves contradiction, for there are many persons who
affirm freedom, and this they do, if the determinist be right,
necessarily. The affirmation of freedom, on the other hand, is free
from such an absurdity.
[11] _Ibid_., p. 138.
Such is the conclusion to which Renouvier brings us after his wealth of
logical and moral considerations. He combines both types of discussion
and argument in order to undermine the belief in determinism and to
uphold freedom, which is, in his view, the essential attribute of
personality and of the universe itself. He thus succeeded in altering
substantially the balance of thought in favour of freedom, and further
weight was added to the same side of the scales by the new spiritualist
group who placed freedom in the forefront of their thought.
III
The development of the treatment of this problem within the thought of
the new spiritualists or idealists is extremely interesting, and it
proceeded finally to a definite doctrine of contingency as the century
drew to its close. The considerations set forth are usually
psychological in tone, and not so largely ethical as in the
neo-critical philosophy.
Ravaisson declared himself a champion of freedom. He accepted the
principle of Leibnitz, to the effect that everything has a reason, from
which it follows that everything is necessitated, without which there
could be no certitude and no science. But, says Ravaisson, there are
two kinds of necessity—one absolute, one relative. The former is
logical, the type of the principle of identity, and is found in
syllogisms and in mathematics, which is just logic applied to quantity.
The other type of necessity is moral, and is, unlike the former,
perfectly in accord with freedom. It indeed implies freedom, the
freedom of self-determination. The truly wise man can- not help doing
what is right and good. The slave of Passion and caprice and evil has
no freedom. The wise man selecting the good chooses it infallibly, but
at the time with perfect free-will. “It is perhaps because the good or
the beautiful is simply nothing other than love—that is, the power of
will in all its purity, and so to will what is truly good is to will
oneself (_c’est se vouloir soi-même_).”[12]
[12] _La Philosophie en France_, p. 268.
Nature is not, as the materialists endeavour to maintain, entirely
geometrical—that is to say, fatalistic in character. Morality enters
into the scheme of things and, with it, ends freely striven for. There
is present a freedom which is a kind of necessity, yet opposed to
fatalism. This freedom involves a determination by conceptions of
perfection, ideals of beauty and of good. “Fatality is but an
appearance; spontaneity and freedom constitute reality.”[13] So far,
continues Ravaisson, from all things operating by brute mechanism or by
pure hazard, things operate by the development of a tendency to
perfection, to goodness and beauty. Instead of everything submitting to
a blind destiny, everything obeys, and obeys willingly, a divine
Providence.
[13] _Ibid_., p. 270.
Ravaisson’s fundamental spiritualism is clear in all this, and it
serves as the starting-point for the thinkers who follow him.
Spiritualism is bound up with spontaneity, creation, freedom, and this
is his central point, this insistence on freedom. While resisting
mechanical determination he endeavours to retain a determination of
another kind—namely, by ends, a teleology or finalism. This is
extremely interesting when observed in relation to the subsequent
development in Lachelier, Boutroux, Blondel and Bergson.
Lachelier’s treatment of freedom is an important landmark in the
spiritualist development. By his concentrated analysis of the problem
of induction he brought out the significance of efficient and final
causes respectively. He appears as the pupil of Ravaisson, whose
initial inspiration is apparent in his whole work, especially in his
treatment of freedom. He dwells upon the fact of the spontaneity of the
spirit—a point of view which Ravaisson succeeded in imparting to the
three thinkers, Lachelier, Boutroux and Bergson. Besides the influence
of Ravaisson, however, that of Kant and Leibnitz appears in Lachelier’s
attitude to freedom. Yet he passes beyond the Kantian position, and he
rejects the double-aspect doctrine which Leibnitz maintained with
regard to efficient and final causes. Lachelier insists that the
spontaneity of spirit stands above and underlies the whole of nature.
This is the point which Boutroux, under Lachelier’s influence, took up
in his _Contingence des Lois de la Nature_. Lachelier, in attacking the
purely mechanistic conception of the universe, endeavoured, as he
himself put it, “to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for
death and freedom for fatalism.” Rather than universal necessity it is
universal contingence which is the real definition of existence. We are
free to determine ourselves in accordance with ends we set before us,
and to act in the manner necessary to accomplish those ends. Our life
itself, as he shows in the conclusion of his brilliant little article
_Psychologie et Métaphysique_, is creative, and we must beware of
arguing that what we have been makes us what we are, for that character
which we look upon as determining us need not do so if we free
ourselves from habit, and, further, this character is, in any case,
itself the result of our free actions over extended time, the free
creation of our own personality.
While with Ravaisson and Lachelier the concept of freedom was being
rather fully developed in opposition to the determinist doctrines,
Fouillée, in his brilliant and acute thesis on _Liberté et
Déterminisme_, endeavoured to call a halt to this supremacy of Freedom,
and to be true to the principles of reconciliation which he laid down
for himself in his philosophy. He confesses himself, at the outset, to
be a pacifist rather than a belligerent in this classic dispute between
determinists on the one hand and partisans of freedom on the other. He
believes that, on intimate investigation pursued sufficiently far, the
two opposing doctrines will be seen to converge. Such a declaration
would seem to be dangerously superficial in a warfare as bitter and as
sharp as this. It must be admitted that, as is the case with many who
profess to conciliate two conflicting views, Fouillée leaves us at
times without precise and definite indication of his own position.
In contrast to the attitude of Ravaisson and Lachelier Fouillée
inclines in some respects to the attitude of Taine and many passages of
his book show him to be holding at least a temporary brief for the
partisans of determinism. He agrees notably with Taine in his objecting
to the contention that under the determinist theory moral values lose
their significance. Fouillée claims that it is both incorrect and
unfair to argue that “under the necessity-hypothesis a thing being all
that it can be is thereby all that it should be.”[14].
[14] _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, p. 51 (fourth edition).
He goes on to point out that the consciousness of independence, which
is an essential of freedom, may be nothing more than a lack of
consciousness of our dependence. Motives he is inclined to speak of as
determining the will itself, while he looks upon the “liberty of
indifference” or of hazard as merely a concession to the operations of
mechanical necessity. The “liberty of indifference” is often the mere
play of instinct and of fatality, while hazard, so far from being an
argument in the hands of the upholders of freedom, is really a
determination made previously by something other than one’s own will.
This is a direct attack upon the doctrines put forward by both Cournot
and Renouvier. Fouillée is well aware of this, and twenty pages of his
thesis are devoted to a critical and hostile examination of the
statements of both Renouvier and his friend Lequier.[15] Fouillée
claims that these two thinkers have only disguised and misplaced the
“liberty of indifference”; they have not, he thinks, really suppressed
it, although both of them profess to reject it absolutely. A keen
discussion between Fouillée and Renouvier arose from this and continued
for some time, being marked on both sides by powerful dialectic.
Renouvier used his paper the _Critique philosophique_ as his medium,
while Fouillée continued in subsequent editions of his thesis, in his
_Idée moderne du Droit_ and also in his acute study _Critique des
Systèmes de Morale contemporains_. Fouillée took Renouvier to task
particularly for his maintaining that if all be determined then truth
and error are indistinguishable. Fouillée claims that the distinction
between truth and error is by no means parallel to that between
necessity and freedom. An error may, he points out, be necessitated,
and consequently we must look elsewhere for our doctrine of certitude
than to the affirmation of freedom. In the philosophy of Renouvier, as
we have seen, these two are intimately connected. Fouillée criticises
the neo-critical doctrine of freedom on the ground that Renouvier mars
his thought by a tendency to look upon the determinist as a passive and
inert creature. This, he says, is “the argument of laziness” applied to
the intelligence. “One forgets,” says Fouillée, “that if intelligence
is a mirror, it is not an immovable and powerless mirror: it is a
mirror always turning itself to reality.”[16]
[15] _Ibid_., pp. 117-137.
[16] _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, p. 129.
On examining closely the difference between Renouvier and Fouillée over
this problem of freedom, we may attribute it to the fact that while the
one thinker is distinctly and rigorously an upholder of continuity, the
other believes in no such absolute continuity. For Fouillée there is,
in a sense, nothing new under the sun, while Renouvier in his thought,
which has been well described as a philosophy of discontinuity, has a
place for new things, real beginnings, and he is in this way linked up
to the doctrine of creative development as set forth ultimately by
Bergson. It will be seen also as we proceed that Fouillée, for all he
has to say on behalf of determinism, is not so widely separated in his
view of freedom from that worked out by Bergson, although at the first
glance the gulf between them seems a wide one.
Fouillée, while attacking Renouvier, did not spare that other acute
thinker, Lachelier, from the whip of his criticism. He takes objection
to a passage in that writer’s _Induction_ where he advocates the
doctrine that the production of ideas “is free in the most rigorous
sense of that word, since each idea is in itself absolutely independent
of that which precedes it, and is born out of nothing, as is a world.”
To this view of the spontaneity of the spirit Fouillée opposes the
remark that Lachelier is considering only the _new forms_ which are
assumed by a mechanism which is always operating under the same laws of
causality. He asks us in this connection to imagine a kaleidoscope
which is being turned round. The images which succeed each other will
be in this sense a formal creation, a form _independent_ of that which
went before, but, as he is anxious to remind us, the same mechanical
and geometrical laws will be operating continually in producing these
forms.
Having had these encounters with the upholders of freedom, and thus to
some degree having conveyed the impression of being on the side of the
determinists, Fouillée proceeds to the task he had set himself—namely,
that of reconciliation. He felt the unsatisfactoriness of Kant’s
treatment of freedom,[17] and he endeavours to remedy the lack in Kant
of a real link between the determinism of the natural sciences and the
human consciousness of freedom, realised in the practical reason.
Fouillée proposes to find in his _idées-forces_ a middle term and to
offer us a solution of the problem at issue in the dispute.
[17] See above, p. 136.
He begins by showing that there has been an unfortunate neglect of one
important factor in the case—a factor whose reality is frankly admitted
by both parties. This central, incontestable fact is the _idea_ of
freedom. This idea, according to Fouillée, arises in us as the result
Of a combination of various psychological factors, such as notions of
diversity, possibility, with the tendency to action arising from the
notion of action, which thus shows itself as a force. The combination
of these results in the genesis of the idea of freedom. Now the
stronger this idea of freedom is in our minds the more we make it
become a reality. It is an “idea-force” which by being thought tends to
action and thus increases in power and fruitfulness. The idea of
freedom becomes, by a kind of determinism, more powerful in proportion
to the degree with which it is acted upon. Determinism thus reflects
upon itself and in a curious way turns to operate against itself. This
directing power of the idea of freedom cannot be denied even by the
most rigorous upholders of determinism. They at least are forced to
find room in their doctrine for _the idea_ of freedom and its practical
action on the lives of men, both individually and in societies. The
vice of the doctrines of determinism has been the refusal to admit the
reality of the liberating idea of freedom, which is tending always to
realise itself.
The belief in freedom is, therefore, Fouillée claims, a powerful force
in the world. Nothing is a more sure redeemer of men and societies from
evil ways than the realisation of this idea of freedom. So largely is
this the case that indeed the extinction of the _belief_ in freedom
would, he argues, not differ much in consequence from the finding that
freedom was an illusion, or, if it be a fact, its abolition.
Having thus rectified the doctrine of determinism by including a place
within it for _the idea_ of freedom, Fouillée proceeds by careful
analysis to show the error of belief in freedom understood as that of
an indifferent will. This raises as many fallacious views as that of a
determinism bereft of the idea of freedom. The capricious and
indifferent liberty he rejects, and in so doing shows us the importance
of the intelligent power of willing, and also reaffirms the
determinists’ thesis of inability to do certain things. The psychology
of character shows us a determined freedom, and in the intelligent
personality a reconciliation of freedom and determinism is seen to be
effected. Fouillée shows that if it were not true that very largely
what we have been makes us what we are, and that what we are determines
our future actions, then education, moral guidance, laws and social
sanctions would all be useless. Indifferentism in thought is the
reversal of all thought.
Fouillée sees that the antithesis between Freedom and Necessity is not
absolute, and he modifies the warmth of Renouvier’s onslaughts upon the
upholders of determinism. But he believes we can construct a notion of
moral freedom which will not be incompatible with the determinism of
nature. To effect this reconciliation, however, we must abandon the
view of Freedom as a decision indifferently made, an action of sheer
will unrelated to intelligence. Freedom is not caprice; it is, Fouillée
claims, a power of indefinite development.
Yet, in the long and penetrating Introduction to his volume on the
_Evolutionnisme des Idées-forces_, Fouillée points out that however
much science may feel itself called upon to uphold a doctrine of
determinism for its own specific purposes, we must remember that the
sphere of science is not all-embracing. There is the sphere of action,
and the practical life demands and, to a degree demonstrates, freedom.
Fouillee admits in this connection the indetermination of the future,
_pour notre esprit_. We act upon this idea of relative indeterminism,
combining with it the idea of our own action, the part which we
personally feel called upon to play. He recognises in his analysis how
important is this point for the solution of the problem. We cannot
overlook the contribution which our personality is capable of making to
the whole unity of life and experience, not only by its achievements in
action, but by its ideals, by that which we feel both _can_ and
_should_ be. Herein lies, according to Fouillée’s analysis, the secret
of duty and the ideal of our power to fulfil it, based upon the central
idea of our freedom. By thus acting on these ideas, and by the light
and inspiration of these ideals, we tend to realise them. It is this
which marks the point where a doctrine of pure determinism not only
shows itself erroneous and inadequate, but as Fouillee puts it, the
human consciousness is the point where it is obliged to turn against
itself “as a serpent which bites its own tail.”[18] Fatalism is a
speculative hypothesis and nothing else. Freedom is equally an
hypothesis, but, adds Fouillée, it is an hypothesis which is at work in
the world.
[18] _Evolutionnisme des Idées-forces_, Introduction, p. lxxiv.
In the thought of Guyau there is a further insistence upon freedom in
spite of the fact that his spiritualism is super-added to much which
reveals the naturalist and positive outlook. He upholds freedom and,
indeed, contingency, urging, as against Ravaisson’s teleology, that
there is no definite tendency towards truth, beauty and goodness. At
all times, too, Guyau is conscious of union with nature and with his
fellows in a way which operates against a facile assertion of freedom.
In his _Vers d’un Philosophe_ he remarks:
“_Ce mot si doux au coeur et si cher, Liberté,
J’en préfèrs encore un: c’est Solidarité._”[19]
[19] _Vers d’un Philosophe, “Solidarité,”_ p. 38.
The maintenance of the doctrine of liberty, which in view of the facts
we are bound to maintain, does away, Guyau insists, with the doctrine
of Providence; for him, as for Bergson, there is no _prévision_ but
only _nouveauté_ in the universe. Guyau indeed is not inclined to admit
even that end which Bergson seems to favour—namely, “spontaneity of
life itself.” The world does not find its end in us, any more than we
find our “ends” fixed for us in advance. Nothing is fixed, arranged or
predetermined; there is not even a primitive adaptation of things to
one another, for such adaptation would involve the pre-existence of
ideas prior to the material world, together with a demiurge arranging
things upon a plan in the manner of an architect. In reality there is
no plan; every worker conceives his own. The world is a superb example,
not of order, such as we associate with the idea of Providence in
action, but the reverse, disorder, the result of contingency and
freedom.
The supreme emphasis upon the reality of freedom appears, however, in
the work of Boutroux and of Bergson at the end of our period. They
arrive at a position diametrically opposed to that of the upholders of
determinism, by their doctrines of contingency as revealed both in the
evolution of the universe and in the realm of personal life. There is
thus seen, as was the case with the problem of science, a complete
“turn of the tide” in the development since Comte.
Boutroux, summing up his thesis _La contingence des Lois de la Nature_,
indicates clearly in his concluding chapter his belief in contingency,
freedom and creativeness. The old adage, “nothing is lost, nothing is
created,” to which science seems inclined to attach itself, has not an
absolute value, for in the hierarchy of creatures contingency, freedom,
newness appear in the higher ranks. There is at work no doubt a
principle of conservation, but this must not lead us to deny the
existence and action of another principle, that of creation. The world
rises from inorganic to organic forms, from matter to spirit, and in
man himself from mere sensibility to intelligence, with its capacity
for criticising and observing, and to will capable of acting upon
things and modifying them by freedom.
Boutroux inclines to a doctrine of finalism somewhat after the manner
of Ravaisson. The world he conceives as attracted to an end; the
beautiful and the good are ideals seeking to be realised; but this
belief in finality does not, he expressly maintains, exclude
contingency. To illustrate this, Boutroux uses a metaphor from
seamanship: the sailors in a ship have a port to make for, yet their
adaptations to the weather and sea en route permit of contingency along
with the finality involved in their making for port. So it is with
beings in nature. They have not merely the one end, to exist amid the
obstacles and difficulties around them, “they have an ideal to realise,
and this ideal consists in approaching to God, to his likeness, each
after his kind. The ideal varies with the creatures, because each has
his special nature, and can only imitate God in and by his own
nature.”[20]
[20] _La Contingence des Lois de la Nature_, p. 158.
Boutroux’s doctrine of freedom and contingency is not opposed to a
teleological conception of the universe, and in this respect he stands
in contrast to Bergson, who, in the rigorous application of his theory
of freedom, rules out all question of teleology. With Renouvier and
with Bergson, however, Boutroux agrees in maintaining that this
freedom, which is the basis of contingency in things, is not and cannot
be a datum of experience, directly or indirectly, because experience
only seizes things which are actually realised, whereas this freedom is
a creative power, anterior to the act. Heredity, instinct, character
and habit are words by which we must not be misled or overawed into a
disbelief in freedom. They are not absolutely fatal and fully
determined. The same will, insists Boutroux, which has created a habit
_can_ conquer it. Will must not be paralysed by bowing to the assumed
supremacy of instincts or habits. Habit itself is not a contradiction
of spontaneity; it is itself a result of spontaneity, a state of
spontaneity itself, and does not exclude contingency or freedom.
Metaphysics can, therefore, according to Boutroux, construct a doctrine
of freedom based on the conception of contingency. The supreme
principles according to this philosophy will be laws, not those of the
positive sciences, but the laws of beauty and goodness, expressing in
some measure the divine life and supposing free agents. In fact the
triumph of the good and the beautiful will result in the replacement of
laws of nature, strictly so called, by the free efforts of wills
tending to perfection—that is, to God.
Further studies upon the problem of freedom are to be found in
Boutroux’s lectures given at the Sorbonne in 1892-93 in the course
entitled _De l’Idée de la Loi naturelle dans la Science et la
Philosophie contemporaines_. He there recognises in freedom the crucial
question at issue between the scientists and the philosophers, for he
states the object of this course of lectures as being a critical
examination of the notion we have of the laws of nature, with a view to
determining the situation of human personality, particularly in regard
to free action.[21] Boutroux recognises that when the domain of science
was less extensive and less rigorous than it is now it was much easier
to believe in freedom. The belief in Destiny possessed by the ancients
has faded, but we may well ask ourselves, says Boutroux, whether modern
science has not replaced it by a yet more rigorous fatalism.[22] He
considers that the modern doctrine of determinism rests upon two
assumptions—namely, that mathematics is a perfectly intelligible
science, and is the expression of absolute determinism; also that
mathematics can be applied with exactness to reality. These assumptions
the lecturer shows to be unjustifiable. Mathematics and experience can
never be fitted exactly into each other, for there are elements in our
experience and in our own nature which cannot be mathematically
expressed. This Boutroux well emphasises in his lecture upon
sociological laws, where he asserts that history cannot be regarded as
the unrolling of a single law, nor can the principle of causality,
strictly speaking, be applied to it.[23] An antecedent certainly may be
an influence but not a cause, as properly understood. He here agrees
with Renouvier s position and attitude to history, and shows the vital
bearing of the problem of freedom upon the philosophy of history, to
which we shall presently give our special attention.
[21] _De l’Idée de la Loi naturelle_, Lecture IV., p. 29.
[22] Compare Janet’s remark, given on p. 136.
[23] Lecture XIII.
Instead of the ideal of science, a mathematical unity, experience shows
us, Boutroux affirms, a hierarchy of beings, displaying variety and
spontaneity—in short, freedom. So far, therefore, from modern science
being an advocate of universal determinism, it is really, when rightly
regarded, a demonstration, not of necessity, but of freedom. Boutroux’s
treatment of the problem of freedom thus demonstrates very clearly its
connection with that of science, and also with that of progress. It
forms pre-eminently the central problem.
The idea of freedom is prominent in the “philosophy of action” and in
the Bergsonian philosophy; indeed, Bergson’s treatment of the problem
is the culmination of the development of the idea in Cournot, Renouvier
and the neo-spiritualists. In Blondel the notion is not so clearly
worked out, as there are other considerations upon which he wishes to
insist. Blondel is deeply concerned with the power of ideals over
action, and his thought of freedom has affinities to the psychology of
the _idées-forces_. This is apparent in his view of the will, where he
does not admit a purely voluntarist doctrine. His insistence on the
dynamic of the will in action is clear, but he reminds us that the will
does not cause or produce everything, for the will wills to be what is
not yet; it strives for achievement, to gain something beyond itself.
Much of Blondel’s treatment of freedom is coloured by his religious and
moral psychology, factors with which Bergson does not greatly concern
himself in his writings. Blondel endeavours to maintain man’s freedom
of action and at the same time to remain loyal to the religious notion
of a Divine Providence, or something akin to that. Consequently he is
led to the dilemma which always presents itself to the religious
consciousness when it asserts its own freedom—namely, how can that
freedom be consistent with Divine guidance or action? Christian
theology has usually been determinist in character, but Blondel
attempts to save freedom by looking upon God as a Being immanent in
man.
Bergson makes Freedom a very central point in his philosophy, and his
treatment of it bears signs of the influence of De Biran, Ravaisson,
Lachelier, Guyau and Boutroux. He rejects, however, the doctrine of
finality as upheld by Ravaisson, Lachelier and Boutroux, while he
stresses the contingency which this last thinker had brought forward.
His solution of the problem is, however, peculiarly his own, and is
bound up with his fundamental idea of change, or LA DURÉE.
In his work _Les Données immédiates de la Conscience_, or _Time and
Free-Will_, he criticises the doctrine of physical determinism, which
is based on the principle of the conservation of energy, and on a
purely mechanistic conception of the universe. He here points out, and
later stresses in his _Matiere et Mémoire_, the fact that it has not
been proved that a strictly determined psychical state corresponds to a
definite cerebral state. We have no warrant for concluding that because
the physiological and the psychological series exhibit some
corresponding terms that therefore the two series are absolutely
parallel. To do so is to settle the problem of freedom in an entirely
_a priori_ manner, which is unjustifiable.
The more subtle and plausible case for psychological determinism
Bergson shows to be no more tenable than that offered for the physical.
It is due to adherence to the vicious Association-psychology, which is
a psychology without a self. To say the self is determined by motive
will not suffice, for in a sense it is true, in another sense it is
not, and we must be careful of our words. If we say the self acts in
accordance with the strongest motive, well and good, but how do we know
it is the strongest? Only because it has prevailed—that is, only
because the self acted upon it, which is totally different from
claiming that the self was determined by it externally. To say the self
is determined by certain tives is to say it is self-determined. The
essential thing in all this is the vitality of the self.
The whole difficulty, Bergson points out, arises from the fact that all
attempts to demonstrate freedom tend only to strengthen the artificial
case for determinism, because freedom is only characteristic of a self
_in action_. He is here in line on this point with Renouvier and
Boutroux, although the reasons he gives for it go beyond in
psychological penetration those assigned by these thinkers. When our
action is over, says Bergson, it seems plausible to argue a case for
determinism because of our spatial conception of time and the
relationships of events in time. We have a habit of thinking in terms
of space, by mathematical time, not in real time or _la durée_ as
Bergson calls it, the time in which the living soul acts.
Bergson thus makes room in the universe for a freedom of the human
will, a creative activity, and thus delivers us from the bonds of
necessity and fatalism in which the physical sciences and the
associationist psychology would bind us. We perceive ourselves as
centres of indetermination, creative spirits. We must guard our
freedom, for it is an essential attribute of spirit. In so far as we
tend to become dominated by matter, which acts upon us in habit and
convention, we lose our freedom. It is not absolute, and many never
achieve it, for their personality never shines forth at all: they live
their lives in habit and routine, victims of automatism. We have,
however, Bergson urges, great power of creation. He stresses, as did
Guyau, the Conception of Life, as free, expanding, and in several
respects his view of freedom is closer to that of Guyau than to that of
Boutroux, in spite of the latter’s contingency. There is no finalism
admitted by Bergson, for he sees in any teleology only “a reversed
mechanism.”
Obviously the maintenance of such a doctrine of freedom as that of
Bergson is of central importance in any philosophy which contains it.
Our conceptions of ethics and of progress depend upon our view of
freedom. For Bergson “the portals of the future stand wide open, the
future is being made.” He is an apostle of a doctrine of absolute
contingency which he applied to the evolution of the world, in his
famous volume _L’Evolution Créatrice_ (published in 1907). His
philosophy has been termed pessimistic by some in view of his rejection
of any teleological conception. Such a doctrine would conflict with his
“free” universe and his absolute contingency. On the other hand, it
leaves open an optimistic view, because of its freedom, its insistence
upon the possibilities of development. It is not only a reaction
against the earlier doctrines of determinism, it is a deliverance of
the human soul which has always refused, even when religious, to
abandon entirely the belief in its own freedom.
Such is the doctrine of freedom which closes our period, a striking
contrast to the determinism which, under the influence of modern
science, characterised its opening. The critique of science and the
assaults upon determinism proceeded upon parallel lines. In many
respects they were two aspects of the one problem, and in themselves
were sufficient to describe the essential development in the thought of
our half century, for the considerations of progress, ethics and
religion to which we now turn derive their significance largely from
what has been set forth in these chapters on Science and Freedom.
CHAPTER V
PROGRESS
INTRODUCTORY : Freedom and Progress intimately connected—Confidence in
Progress, a marked feature of the earlier half of the nineteenth
century, was bound up with confidence in Science and Reason, and in a
belief in determinism, either natural or divine—Condorcet, Saint-Simon,
Comte and others proclaim Progress as a dogma.
I. The idea of progress in Vacherot, Tame and Renan—Interesting
reflections of Renan based on belief in Reason.
II. Cournot and Renouvier regard Progress in a different light, owing
to their ideas on Freedom—They look upon it as a possibility only, but
not assured, not inevitable—Renouvier’s study of history in relation to
progress and his view of immortality as Progress—No law of progress
exists.
III. The new spiritualist group emphasise the lack of any law of
progress, by their insistence on the spontaneity of the spirit,
creativeness and contingency—Difficulties of finalsm or teleology in
relation to progress as free—No law or guarantee of progress.
CONCLUSION : Complete change from earlier period regarding Progress—New
view of it developed—Facile optimism rejected.
CHAPTER V
PROGRESS
Intimately bound up with the idea of freedom is that of progress. For,
although our main approach to the discussion of freedom was made by way
of the natural sciences, by a critique of physical determinism, and
also by way of the problem of personal action, involving a critique of
psychological determinism, it must be noted that there have appeared
throughout the discussion very clear indications of the vital bearing
of freedom upon the wide field of humanity’s development considered as
a whole—in short, its history. The philosopher must give some account
of history, if he is to leave no gap in his view of the universe. The
philosophy of history will obviously be vastly different if it be based
on determinism rather than on freedom. When the philosopher looks at
history his thoughts must inevitably centre around the idea of
progress. He may believe in it or may reject it as an illusion, but his
attitude to it will be very largely a reflection of the doctrine which
he has formed regarding freedom.
The notion of progress is probably the most characteristic feature
which distinguishes modern civilisation from those of former times. It
would have seemed to the Greeks foolishness. We owe it to the people
who, in the modern world, have been what Greece was in the ancient
world, the glorious mother of ideas. The eighteenth century was marked
in France by a growing belief in progress, which was encouraged by the
Encyclopaedists and rose to enthusiasm at the Revolution. Its best
expression was that given by Condorcet, himself an Encyclopaedist, and
originally a supporter of the Revolution. His _Sketch of an Historical
Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind_ was written in 1793 (while
its author was threatened with the guillotine[1]), published two years
later, and became, in the early years of the nineteenth century, a
powerful stimulus to thought concerning progress. Much of the work is
defective, but it had a great influence upon Saint-Simon, the early
socialists, and upon the doctrines of Auguste Comte, which themselves
are immediate antecedents of our own period. We may note briefly here,
that Condorcet believed in a sure and infallible progress in knowledge
and in social welfare. This is the important doctrine which Saint-Simon
and Comte both accepted from him. His ideal of progress is contained in
the three watchwords of the Revolution, _Liberté_, _Egalité_,
_Fraternité_, particularly the last two. He forecasts an abandonment of
militarism, prophesies an era of universal peace, and the reign of
equality between the sexes. Equality is a point which he insists upon
very keenly, and, although he did not speak of sociology as did Comte,
nor of socialism as did Saint-Simon, he claimed that the true history
of mankind is the history of the great mass of workers: it is not
diplomatic and military, not the record of dazzling deeds of great men.
Condorcet, however, was dogmatic in his belief in progress, and he did
not work out any “law” of progress, although he believed progress to be
a law of the universe, in general, and an undeniable truth in regard to
the life-history of mankind.
[1] He was ultimately imprisoned and driven to suicide.
Later, his friend Cabanis upheld a similarly optimistic view, and
endeavoured to argue for it, against the Traditionalists, who we may
remember endeavoured to restate Catholicism, and to make an appeal to
those whom the events of the Revolution had disturbed and
disillusioned. The outcome of the Terror had somewhat shaken the belief
in a straightforward progress, but enthusiastic exponents of the
doctrine were neither lacking nor silent. Madame de Staël continued the
thought of Condorcet, thus forming a link between him and Saint-Simon
and Comte. The influence of the Traditionalists and the general current
of thought and literature known as Romanticism, helped also to solve a
difficulty which distinguishes Condorcet from Comte. This difficulty
lay in the eighteenth-century attitude to the Middle Ages, which
Condorcet had accepted, and which seriously damaged his thesis of
general progress, for in the eighteenth century the Middle Ages were
looked upon as a black, dark regress, for which no thinker had a good
word to say. The change of view is seen most markedly when we come to
Comte, whose admiration of the Middle Ages is a conspicuous feature of
his work. While, however, Saint-Simon and Comte were working out their
ideas, great popularity was given to the belief in progress by the
influence of Cousin, Jouffroy, Guizot, and by Michelet’s translation of
the _Scienza nuova_ of the Italian thinker Vico, a book then a century
old but practically unknown in France. For Cousin, the world process
was a result of a necessary evolution of thought, which he conceived in
rather Hegelian fashion. Jouffroy agreed with this fatal progress,
although he endeavoured to reconcile it with that of personal freedom.
Guizot’s main point was that progress and civilisation are the same
thing, or rather, that civilisation is to be defined only by progress,
for that is its fundamental idea. His definition of progress is not,
however, strikingly clear, and he calls attention to two types of
progress—one involving an improvement in social welfare, the other in
the spiritual or intellectual life. Although Guizot tried to show that
progress in both these forms is a fact, he did not touch ultimate
questions, nor did he successfully show that progress is the universal
key to human history. He did not really support his argument that
civilisation _is_ progress in any convincing way, but he gave a
stimulus to reflection on the question of the relationship of these
two. Michelet’s translation of Vico came at an appropriate time, and
served a useful purpose. It showed to France a thinker who, while not
denying a certain progress over short periods, denied it over the long
period, and reverted rather to the old notion of an eternal recurrence.
For Vico, the course of human history was not rectilineal but rather
spiral, although he, too, refrained from indicating any law. He claimed
clearly enough that each civilisation must give way to barbarism and
anarchy, and the cycle be again begun.
Such were the ideas upon progress which were current at the time when
Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte were busily thinking out their
doctrines, the main characteristics of which we have already noted in
our Introduction on the immediate antecedents of our period. The
thought given to the question of progress in modern France is almost
unintelligible save in the light of the doctrines current from
Condorcet, through Saint-Simon to Comte, for the second half of the
century is again characterised by a criticism and indeed a reaction
against the idea professed in the first half. This was true in regard
to Science and to Freedom. We shall see a similar type of development
illustrated again respecting Progress.
Already we have noted the general aim and object which both Saint-Simon
and Comte had in view. The important fact for our discussion here is
that Saint-Simon, by his respect for the Middle Ages, and for the power
of religion, was able to rectify the defects which the ideas of the
eighteenth century had left in Condorcet’s doctrine of progress.
Moreover, he claimed, as Condorcet had not done, to indicate a “law of
progress,” which gives rise alternately to “organic” and to “critical”
periods. The Middle Ages were, in the opinion of Saint-Simon, an
admirable period, displaying as they did an organic society, where
there was a temporal and spiritual authority. With Luther began an
anarchical, critical period. According to Saint-Simon s law of progress
a new organic period will succeed this, and the characteristic of that
period will be socialism. He advocated a gradual change, not a violent
revolutionary one, but he saw in socialism the inevitable feature of
the new era. With its triumph would come a new world organisation and a
league of peoples in which war would be no more, and in which the lot
of the proletariat would be free from oppression and misery. The
Saint-Simonist School became practically a religious sect, and the
chief note in its gospel was “Progress.”
That the notion of progress was conspicuous in the thought of this time
is very evident. It was, indeed, in the foreground, and a host of
writers testify to this, whom we cannot do much more than mention here.
A number of them figured in the events of 1848. The social reformers
all invoked “Progress” as justification for their theories being put
into action. Bazard took up the ideas of Saint-Simon and expounded them
in his _Exposition de la Doctrine saint-simonienne_ (1830). Buchez, in
his work on the philosophy of history, assumed progress (1833). The
work of Louis Blanc on _L’Organisation du Travail_ appeared in 1839 in
a periodical calling itself _Revue des Progrès_. The brochure from
Proudhon, on property, came in 1840, and was followed later by _La
Philosophie du Progrès_ (1851). Meanwhile Fourier’s _Théorie des Quatre
Mouvements et des Destinées générales_ attempted in rather a fantastic
manner to point the road to progress. Worthless as many of his quaint
pages are, they were a severe indictment of much in the existing order,
and helped to increase the interest and the faith in progress.
Fourier’s disciple, Considérant, was a prominent figure in 1848. The
Utopia proposed by Cabet insisted upon _fraternité_ as the keynote to
progress, while the volumes of Pierre Leroux, _De l’Humanité_, which
appeared in the same year as Cabet’s volume, 1840, emphasised _égalité_
as the essential factor. His humanitarianism influenced the
woman-novelist, George Sand. This same watchword of the Revolution had
been eulogised by De Tocqueville in his important study of the American
Republic in 1834, and that writer had claimed _égalité_ as the goal of
human progress. All these men take progress as an undoubted fact; they
only vary by using a different one of the three watchwords, _Liberté_,
_Egalité_, _Fraternité_, to denote the kind of progress they mean.
Meanwhile, Michelet and his friend Quinet combated the Hegelian
conception of history maintained by Cousin, and they claimed _liberté_
to be the watchword of progress. The confidence of all in progress is
almost pathetic in its unqualified optimism. It is not remarkable that
the events of 1851 proved a rude shock. Javary, a writer who, in 1850,
published a little work, _De l’Idée du Progrès_, claimed that the idea
is the supremely interesting question of the time in its relation to a
general philosophy of history and to the ultimate destiny of mankind.
This is fairly evident from the writers we have cited, without Javary’s
remark, but it is worth noting as being the observation of a
contemporary. With the mention of Reynaud’s _Philosophie religieuse_,
upholding the principle of indefinite perfectability and Pelletan’s
_Profession du Foi du XIXe Siècle_, wherein he maintained confidently
and dogmatically that progress is the general law of the universe, we
must pass on from these minor people to consider one who had a
profounder influence on the latter half of the century, and who took
over the notion of progress from Saint-Simon.
This was Comte, whose attitude to progress in many respects resembles
that of Saint-Simon, but he brought to his work a mental equipment
lacking in the earlier writer and succeeded, by the position he gave to
it in his Positive Philosophy, in making the idea of progress one which
subsequent thinkers could not omit from consideration.
According to Comte, the central factor in progress is the mental.
Ideas, as Fouillée was later to assert, are the real forces in
humanity’s history. These ideas develop in accordance with the “Law of
the Three Stages,” already explained in our Introduction. In spite of
the apparent clearness and simplicity of this law, Comte had to admit
that as a general law of all development it was to some degree rendered
difficult in its application by the lack of simultaneity in development
in the different spheres of knowledge and social life. While
recognising the mental as the keynote to progress, he also insisted
upon the solidarity of the physical, intellectual, moral and social
life of man, and to this extent admitted a connection and interaction
between material welfare and intellectual progress. The importance of
this admission lay in the fact that it led Comte to qualify what first
appears as a definite and confident belief in a rectilineal progress.
He admits that such a conception is not true, for there is
retrogression, conflict, wavering, and not a steady development. Yet he
claims that there is a general and ultimate progress about a mean line.
The causes which shake and retard the steady progress are not
all-powerful, they cannot upset the fundamental order of development.
These causes which do give rise to variations are, we may note in
passing, the effects of race, climate and political and military feats
like those of Napoleon, for whom Comte did not disguise his hatred,
styling him the man who had done most harm to humanity. Great men upset
his sociological theories, but Comte was no democrat and strongly
opposed ideas of Liberty and Equality. We have remarked upon his
general attitude to his own age, as one of criticism and anarchy. In
this he was probably correct, but he quite underestimated the extent
and duration of that anarchy, particularly by his estimate of the
decline and fall of Catholicism and of militarism, which he regarded as
the two evils of Europe. The events of the twentieth century would have
been a rude shock to him, particularly the international conflagration
of 1914-1918. It was to Europe that Comte confined his philosophy of
history and consequently narrowed it. He knew little outside this
field.
He endeavoured, however, to apply his new science of sociology to the
development of European history. His work contains much which is good
and instructive, but fails ultimately to establish any law of progress.
It does not seem to have occurred to Comte’s mind that there might not
be one. This was the question which was presented to the thinkers after
him, and occupies the chief place in the subsequent discussion of
progress.
I
In the second half of the century the belief in a definite and
inevitable progress appears in the work of those thinkers inspired by
the positivist spirit, Vacherot, Taine and Renan. Vacherot’s views on
the subject are given in one of his _Essais de Philosophie
critique_,[2] entitled “_Doctrine du Progrès_.” These pages, in which
sublime confidence shines undimmed, were intended as part of a longer
work on the Philosophy of History. Many of Renan’s essays, and
especially the concluding chapters of his work _L’Avenir de la
Science_, likewise profess an extreme confidence in progressive
development. Yet Taine and Renan are both free from the excessive and
glowing confidence expressed by Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Comte.
Undoubtedly the events of their own time reacted upon their doctrine of
progress, and we have already noted the pessimism and disappointment
which coloured their thoughts regarding contemporary political events.
Both, however, are rationalists, and have unshaken faith in the
ultimate triumph of reason.
[2] Published in 1864.
The attitude which Taine adopts to history finds a parallel in the
fatalism and determinism of Spinoza, for he looks upon the entire life
of mankind as the unrolling of a rigidly predetermined series of
events. “Our preferences,” he remarks, “are futile; nature and history
have determined things in advance; we must accommodate ourselves to
them, for it is certain that they will not accommodate themselves to
us.” Taine’s view of history reflects his rejection of freedom, for he
maintains that it is a vast regulated chain which operates
independently of individuals. Fatalism colours it entirely. It is
precisely this attitude of Taine which raises the wrath of Renouvier,
and also that of both Cournot and Fouillée, whose discussions we shall
examine presently. They see in such a doctrine an untrue view of
history and a theory vicious and detestable from a moral standpoint,
although it doubtless, as Fouillée sarcastically remarks, has been a
very advantageous one for the exploiters of humanity in all ages to
teach and to preach to the people.
In passing from Taine’s fatalistic view of history to note his views on
progress we find him asserting that man’s nature does not in itself
inspire great optimism, for that nature is largely animal, and man is
ever ready, however “civilised” he may appear to be, to return to his
native primitive ferocity and barbarism. Man is not, according to
Taine, even a sane animal, for he is by nature mad and foolish. Health
and wisdom only occasionally reign, and so we have no great ground for
optimism when we examine closely the nature of man, as it really is.
Taine’s treatment of the French Revolution[3] shows his hostility to
democracy, and he is sceptical about the value or meaning of the
watchwords, “Rights of Man,” or _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_.
This last, he claims, is merely a verbal fiction useful for disguising
the reality, which is actual warfare of all against all.
[3] _“La Révolution,”_ in his large work, _Les Origines de la France
contemporaine_.