These criticisms were disturbing for those minds who found entire satisfaction in Science or rather in the sciences, but they were somewhat general. Ravaisson’s work inculcated a spirit rather than sustained a dialectic. Its chief value lay in the inspiration which it imparted to subsequent thinkers who endeavoured to work out his general ideas with greater precision.
It was this task which Lachelier set himself in his Induction. He had keenly felt the menace of science, as had Janet;[[29]] he had appreciated the challenge offered to it by Ravaisson’s ideas. Moreover, Lachelier’s acute mind discovered the crucial points upon which the new spiritualism could base its attack upon the purely scientific dogmatism. Whatever Leibnitz might have said, creative spontaneity of the spirit, as it was acclaimed by Ravaisson, could not easily be fitted into the mechanism and determinism upheld by the sciences. Ravaisson had admitted the action of efficient causes in so far as he admitted the action of mechanism, which is but the outcome of these causes. In this way he endeavoured to satisfy the essential demands of the scientific attitude to the universe. But recognising the inadequacy of this attitude he had upheld the reality of final causes and thus opposed to the scientists a metaphysical doctrine akin to the religious attitude of Hellenism and Christianity.
[29] We refer here to the quotation from Janet’s Problèmes du XIXe Siècle, given above on p. 95. Janet himself wrote on Final Causes but not Wlth the depth or penetration of Lachelier.
Lachelier saw that the important point of Ravaisson’s doctrine lay in the problem of these two types of causality. His thesis is therefore devoted to the examination of efficient and final causes. This little work of Lachelier marks a highly important advance in the development of the spiritualist philosophy. He clarifies and re-affirms more precisely the position indicated by Ravaisson. Lacheher tears up the treaty of compromise which was drafted by Leibnitz to meet the rival demands of science with its efficient causes and philosophy with its final causes. The world of free creative spontaneity of the spirit cannot be regarded, Lachelier claims (and this is his vital point), as merely the complement of, or the reflex from, the world of mechanism and determinism.
He works out in his thesis the doctrine that efficient causes can be deduced from the formal laws of thought. This was Taine’s position, and it was the limit of Taine’s doctrine. Lachelier goes further and undermines Taine’s theories by upholding final causes, which he shows depend upon the conception of a totality, a whole which is capable of creating its parts. This view of the whole is a philosophical conception to which the natural sciences never rise, and which they cannot, by the very nature of their data and their methods, comprehend. Yet it is only such a conception which can supply any rational basis for the unity of phenomena and of experience. Only by seeing the variety of all phenomena in the light of such an organic unity can we find any meaning in the term universe, and only thus, continues Lachelier, only on the principle of a rational and universal order and on the reality of final causes, can we base our inductions. The “uniformity of nature,” that fetish of the scientists which, as Lachelier well points out, is merely the empirical regularity of phenomena, offers no adequate basis for a single induction.
Lachelier developed his doctrines further in the article, Psychologie et Métaphysique. We can observe in it the marks which so profoundly distinguish the new spiritualism from the old, as once taught by Cousin. The old spiritualism had no place between its psychology and its metaphysics for the natural sciences. Indeed it was quite incapable of dealing with the problem which their existence and success presented, and so it chose to ignore them as far as possible. The new spiritualism, of which Lachelier is perhaps the profoundest speculative mind, not only is acquainted with the place and results of the sciences, but it feels itself equal to a criticism of them, an advance which marks a highly important development in philosophy.
In this article Lachelier endeavours to pass beyond the standpoint of 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.