The importance of the sociological aspect of all problems was emphasised in a brilliant manner by Guyau (1854-1888), the step-son of Fouillée. Guyau was a gifted young man, whose death at the early age of thirty-four was a sore bereavement for Fouillée and undoubtedly a disaster for philosophy. Guyau was trained by his step-father,[[48]] and assisted him in his work. When ill-health forced both men from their professorships,[[49]] they lived in happy comradeship at Mentone at the same time, it is interesting to note, that Nietzsche was residing there. Equally interesting is it to observe that although Guyau and Fouillée were unaware of the German thinker’s presence or his work, Nietzsche was well acquainted with theirs, particularly that of Guyau. Doubtless he would have been pleased to meet the author of the Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction (1885) and L’Irreligion de l’Avenir (1887). Editions of these books exist in the Nietzsche-Archiv bearing Nietzsche’s notes and comments.
[48] Some authorities are of opinion that Fouillée was actually the father of Guyau. Fouillée married Guyau’s mother.
[49] Guyau taught at the Lycée Condorcet (1874) where young Henri Bergson was studying (1868-1878).
Guyau himself has a certain affinity with Nietzsche, arising from his insistence upon Life and its power; but the author of the delightful little collection Vers d’un Philosophe (1881) is free from the egoism expressed in Der Wille zur Macht. Guyau posits as his idée-directrice the conception of Life, both individual and social, and in this concept he professes to find a basis more fundamental than that of force, movement or existence. Life involves expansion and intension, fecundity and creation. It means also consciousness, intelligence and feeling, generosity and sociability. “He only lives well who lives for others.” Life can only exist by extending. It can never be purely egoistic and endure; a certain giving of itself, in generosity and in love, is necessary for its continuance. Such is the view which the French philosopher-poet expresses in opposition to Nietzsche, starting, however, from the concept of Life did Nietzsche. Guyau worked out a doctrine of ethics and of religion based upon this concept which will demand our special attention in its proper place, when we consider the moral and religious problem. He strove to give an idealistic setting to the doctrines of evolution, and this alone would give him a place among the great thinkers of the period.
In his doctrine of the relation of thought and action Guyau followed the philosophie des idées-forces. On the other hand there are very remarkable affinities between the thought of Guyau and that of Bergson. Guyau is not so severely intellectual as Fouillée; his manner of thought and excellence of style are not unlike Bergson. More noticeably he has a conception of life not far removed from the élan vital. His “expansion of life” has, like Bergson’s évolution créatrice, no goal other than that of its own activity. After Guyau’s death in 1888 it was found that he had been exercised in mind about the problem of Time, for he left the manuscript of a book entitled La Genèse de l’Idée de Temps.[[50]] He therein set forth a belief in a psychological, heterogeneous time other than mathematical time, which is really spatial in character. In this psychological time the spirit lives. The year following Guyau’s death, but before his posthumous work appeared, Bergson published his thesis Les Données immédiates de la Conscience (1889), which is better described by its English title Time and Free Will, and in which this problem which had been present to Guyau’s mind is taken up and treated in an original and striking manner. In Guyau, too, is seen the rise of the conception of activity so marked in the work of Bergson and of Blondel. “It is action and the power of life,” he insists, “which alone can solve, if not entirely at least partially, those problems to which abstract thought gives rise.”[[51]]
[50] This work was edited and published by Fouillée two years after Guyau’s death, and reviewed by Bergson in the Revue philosophique in 1891.
[51] Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction, p. 250.
Bergson, born in 1859, Professor at the Collège de France from 1901 to 1921, now retired, has had a popularity to which none of the other thinkers of this group, or indeed of our period, has attained. He is the only one of the new idealists or spiritualists who is well known outside his own country. For this reason foreigners are apt to regard him as a thinker unrelated to any special current of thought, an innovator. Although much is original and novel in his philosophy, his thought marks the stage in the development to which the spiritualist current has attained in contemporary thought. The movement of which he forms a part we can trace back as far as Maine de Biran, to whom Bergson owes much, as he does also to Ravaisson, Lachelier, Boutroux and Guyau.
Two important books by Bergson came prior to 1900, his Time and Free Will (1889) and his Matter and Memory (1896). His famous Creative Evolution appeared in 1907. It is but his first work “writ large,” for we have in Time and Free Will the essentials of his philosophy.
He makes, as did Guyau, a central point of Change, a universal becoming, and attacks the ordinary notion of time, which he regards as false because it is spatial. We ourselves live and act in durée, which is Bergson’s term for real time as opposed to that fictitious time of the mathematician or astronomer. He thus lays stress upon the inward life of the spirit, with its richness and novelty, its eternal becoming, its self-creation. He has his own peculiar manner of approaching our central problem, that of freedom, of which he realises the importance. For him the problem resolves itself into an application of his doctrine of la durée, to which we shall turn in due course.