[37] The thesis and the article have been published together by Alcan, accompanied by notes on Pascal’s Wager. The Etude sur le Syllogisme also forms a volume in Alcan’s Bibliothèque de Philosophie contemporaine.
Lachelier was a pupil of Ravaisson, and owes his initial inspiration to him. He had, however, a much more rigorous and precise attitude to problems. This is apparent in the concentration of thought contained in his thesis. It is one of Lachelier’s merits that he recognised the significance of Kant’s work in a very profound manner. Until his thesis appeared the influence of Leibnitz had been more noticeable in French thought than that of Kant. It was noticeable in Ravaisson, and Renouvier, in spite of his professed adherence to Kant, passed to a Leibnitzian position in his Nouvelle Monadologie.
The valuable work Du Fondement de l’Induction is concerned mainly with the problem of final causes, which Lachelier deduces from the necessity of totality judgments over and above those which concern merely efficient causes. On the principle of final causes, or a ideological conception of a rational unity and order, he founds Induction. It cannot be founded, he claims, upon a mere empiricism. This is a point which will concern us later in our examination of the problem of science.
Lachelier was left, however, with the dualism of mechanism, operating solely by efficient causes, and teleology manifested in final causes, a dualism from which Kant did not manage to escape. In his article Psychologic et Métaphysique he endeavoured to interpret mechanism itself as a teleological activity of the spirit.[[38]] He indicates the absolute basis of our life and experience, indeed of the universe itself, to be the absolute spontaneity of spirit. In spirit and in freedom we live and move and have our being. We do not affirm ourselves to be what we are, but rather we are what we affirm ourselves to be. We must not say that our present depends upon our past, for we really create all the moments of our life in one and the same act, which is both present to each moment and above them all.[[39]] Here psychology appears as the science of thought itself and resolves itself into metaphysics. Here, too, we find the significance of the new spiritualism; we see its affinity with, and its contrast to, the doctrines of the older spiritualism as professed by Cousin. Lachelier here strikes the note which is so clearly characteristic of this current of thought, and is no less marked in his work than in that of Bergson—namely, a belief in the supremacy of spirit and in the reality of freedom.
[38] It is interesting to compare this with the attitude taken by Lotze in Germany.
[39] Psychologie et Métaphysique, p. 171.
The notion of freedom and of the spontaneity of the spirit became watchwords of the new spiritualist philosophers. Under the work and influence of Boutroux (1845-1921) these ideas were further emphasised and worked out more definitely to a position which assumes a critical attitude to the dogmatism of modern science and establishes a contingency in all things. Boutroux’s thesis De la Contingence des Lois de la Nature appeared in 1874 and was dedicated to Ravaisson. His chief fame and his importance in the development of the spiritualist philosophy rest upon this book alone. In 1894 he published a course of lectures given at the Sorbonne in 1892-3, Sur l’Idée de Loi naturelle, which supplements the thesis. Outside his own country attention has been more readily bestowed upon his writings on the history of philosophy, of which subject he was Professor. In his own country, however, great interest and value are attached to his work on The Contingency of the Laws of Nature. In this Boutroux combines the attitude of Ravaisson with that of Lachelier. The totality of the laws of the universe manifests, according to him, a contingency. No explanation of these laws is possible apart from a free spiritual activity. The stress laid upon contingency in the laws of nature culminates in the belief in the freedom of man.
The critique of science which marked Boutroux’s work has profoundly influenced thinkers like Hannequin, Payot and Milhaud,[[40]] and in the following century appears in the work of Duhem and of Henri Poincaré, the noted mathematician, whose books on La Science et l’Hypothèse (1902), La Valeur de la Science (1905), and Science et Méthode (1909) have confirmed many of Boutroux’s conclusions.[[41]]
[40] Hannequin’s notable work is the Essai critique sur L’Hypothèse des Atomes (1896). Payot’s chief book is La Croyance (1896). Milhaud’s critique of science is contained in his Essai sur les Conditions et les Limites de la Certitude logique (1894), and in Le Rationnel (1898). Duhem’s book is La Théorie physique (1906).
[41] It is interesting to note that Boutroux married Poincaré’s sister, and that his son, Pierre Boutroux, whose education was guided by both his uncle and his father, is now Professor at the Collège de France. Emile Boutroux was a pupil of Zeller, whose lectures on Greek philosophy he attended in Heidelberg, 1868. He expressed to the writer his grief at the later prostitution of German thought to nationalist and materialist aims. He was Professor of the History of Philosophy in Paris from 1888, then Honorary Professor of Modern Philosophy. In 1914 he gave the Hertz Lecture to the British Academy on Certitude et Vérité. He was until his death Directeur de la Fondation Thiers, a college for post-graduate study, literary, philosophical and scientific.