In the work of Boutroux we find a continuation of that type of criticism of science which was a feature in Ravaisson and Lachelier. He has also affinities with Renouvier (and, we may add, with Comte), because of his insistence upon the discontinuity of the sciences; upon the element of “newness” found in each which prevents the higher being deduced from the lower, or the superior explained by reference to the inferior. Boutroux opposes Spencer’s doctrines and is a keen antagonist of Taine and his claim to deduce all from one formula. Such a notion as that of Taine is quite absurd, according to Boutroux, for there is no necessary bond between one and another science. This is Boutroux’s main point in La Contingence des Lois de la Nature.
By a survey of laws of various types, logical, mathematical, mechanical, physical, chemical, biological, psychological and sociological, Boutroux endeavours to show that they are constructions built up from facts. Just as nature offers to the scientist facts for data, so the sciences themselves offer these natural laws as data to the philosopher, for his constructed explanation of things which is metaphysics or philosophy.
“In the actual condition of our knowledge,” he remarks, “science is not one, but multiple; science, conceived as embracing all the sciences, is a mere abstraction.” This is a remark which recalls Renouvier’s witty saying, “I should very much like to meet this person I hear so much about, called ‘science.’” We have only sciences, each working after its own manner upon a small portion of reality. Man has a thirst for knowledge, and he sees, says Boutroux, in the world an “ensemble” of facts of infinite variety. These facts man endeavours to observe, analyse, and describe with increasing exactness. Science, he points out, is just this description.
It is futile to attempt a resolution of all things into the principle of identity. “The world is full of a number of things,” and, therefore, argues Boutroux, the formula A = B can never be strictly and absolutely true. “Nature never offers to us identities, but only resemblances.” This has important bearing upon the law of causality, of which the sciences make so much. For there is such a degree of heterogeneity in the things to which the most elementary and general laws of physics and chemistry are applied that it is impossible to say that the consequent is proportional to the antecedent—that is to say, it is impossible to work out absolutely the statement that an effect is the unique result of a certain invariable cause. The fundamental link escapes us and so, for us, there is a certain contingency in experience. There is, further, a creativeness, a newness, which is unforeseeable. The passage from the inorganic to the organic stresses this, for the observation of the former would never lead us to the other, for it is a creation, a veritable “new” thing. Boutroux is here dealing hard blows at Taine’s conception. He continues it by showing that in the conscious living being we are introduced to a new element which is again absolutely irreducible to physical factors. Life, and consciousness too, are both creators. The life of the mind is absolutely sui generis; it cannot be explained by physiology, by reflex action, or looked upon as merely an epiphenomenon. Already Boutroux finds himself facing the central problem of Freedom. He recognises that as psychological phenomena appear to contain qualities not given in their immediate antecedents, the law of proportion of cause to effect does not apply to the actions of the human mind.
The principle of causality and the principle of the conservation of energy are m themselves scientific “shibboleths,” and neither of them, asserts Boutroux, can be worked out so absolutely as to justify themselves as ultimate descriptions of the universe. They are valuable as practical maxims for the scientist, whose object is to follow the threads of action in this varied world of ours. They are incomplete, and have merely a relative value. Philosophy cannot permit their application to the totality of this living, pulsing universe. For cause, we must remember, does not in its strictly scientific meaning imply creative power. The cause of a phenomenon is itself a phenomenon. “The positive sciences in vain pretend to seize the divine essence or reason behind things.”[[36]] They arrive at descriptive formulæ and there they leave us. But, as Boutroux well reminds us in concluding his thesis, formulas never explain anything because they cannot even explain themselves. They are simply constructions made by observation and abstraction and which themselves require explanation.
[36] Contingence des Lois de la Nature, p 154.
The laws of nature are not restrictions which have been, as it were, imposed upon her They are themselves products of freedom; they are, in her, what habits are to the individual. Their constancy is like the stability of a river-bed which the freely running stream at some early time hollowed out.
The world is an assembly of beings, and its vitality and nature cannot be expressed in a formula. It comprises a hierarchy of creatures, rising from inorganic to organic forms, from matter to spirit, and in man it displays an observing intelligence, rising above mere sensibility and expressly modifying things by free will. In this conception Boutroux follows Ravaisson, and he is also influenced by that thinker’s belief in a spiritual Power of goodness and beauty. He thus leads us to the sphere of religion and philosophy, both of which endeavour, in their own manner, to complete the inadequacy of the purely scientific standpoint. He thus stands linked up in the total development with Cournot and Renouvier, and in his own group with Lachelier, in regard to this question of the relation of philosophy and the sciences.
The critique of science, which is so prominent in Boutroux, was characteristic of a number of thinkers whom we cannot do more than mention here in passing, for in general their work is not in line with the spiritualist development, but is a sub-current running out and separated from the main stream. This is shown prominently in the fact that, while Boutroux’s critique is in the interests of idealism and the maintenance of some spiritual values, much subsequent criticism of science is a mere empiricism and, being divorced from the general principles of the spiritualist philosophy, tends merely to accentuate a vein of uncertainty—indeed, scepticism of knowledge. Such is the general standpoint taken by Milhaud, Payot, and Duhem. Rather apart from these stands the works of acute minds like Poincaré, Durand de Gros, and Hannequin, whose discussion of the atomic doctrines is a work of considerable merit. To these may be added Lalande’s criticism of the doctrine of evolution and integration by his opposing to it that of dissolution and disintegration. Passing references to these books must not, however, detain us from following the main development which, from Boutroux, is carried on by Bergson.
We find that Bergson, like Boutroux, holds no brief for science, and in particular he opposes some of its doctrines which have been dogmatically and uncritically accepted. His work, Matiére et Mémoire, is a direct critique of the scientific postulate of psycho-physical parallelism which Bergson regards as the crux of the problem at issue between science and philosophy—namely, that of freedom. He shows that this theory, which has been adopted by science because of its convenience, ought not to be accepted by philosophy without criticism. In his opinion it cannot stand the criticism which he brings against it. A relation between soul and body is undeniable, but he does not agree that that relation is one of absolute parallelism. To maintain parallelism is to settle at once and beforehand, in an unwarrantably a priori manner, the whole problem of freedom. His intense spiritualism sees also in such a doctrine the deadly enemy Epiphenomenalism, the belief that the spiritual is only a product of the physical. He maintains the unique and irreducible nature of consciousness, and claims that the life of the soul or spirit is richer and wider than the mere physical activity of the brain, which is really its instrument. Bergson asks us to imagine the revolution which might have been, had our early scientists devoted themselves to the study of mind rather than matter, and claims that we suffer from the dogmatism of materialistic science and the geometrical and mathematical conceptions of “a universal science” or “mathematic” which come from the seventeenth century, and are seen later in Taine.