[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.