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