The development of the treatment of this problem within the thought of the new spiritualists or idealists is extremely interesting, and it proceeded finally to a definite doctrine of contingency as the century drew to its close. The considerations set forth are usually psychological in tone, and not so largely ethical as in the neo-critical philosophy.
Ravaisson declared himself a champion of freedom. He accepted the principle of Leibnitz, to the effect that everything has a reason, from which it follows that everything is necessitated, without which there could be no certitude and no science. But, says Ravaisson, there are two kinds of necessity—one absolute, one relative. The former is logical, the type of the principle of identity, and is found in syllogisms and in mathematics, which is just logic applied to quantity. The other type of necessity is moral, and is, unlike the former, perfectly in accord with freedom. It indeed implies freedom, the freedom of self-determination. The truly wise man can- not help doing what is right and good. The slave of Passion and caprice and evil has no freedom. The wise man selecting the good chooses it infallibly, but at the time with perfect free-will. “It is perhaps because the good or the beautiful is simply nothing other than love—that is, the power of will in all its purity, and so to will what is truly good is to will oneself (c’est se vouloir soi-même).”[[12]]
[12] La Philosophie en France, p. 268.
Nature is not, as the materialists endeavour to maintain, entirely geometrical—that is to say, fatalistic in character. Morality enters into the scheme of things and, with it, ends freely striven for. There is present a freedom which is a kind of necessity, yet opposed to fatalism. This freedom involves a determination by conceptions of perfection, ideals of beauty and of good. “Fatality is but an appearance; spontaneity and freedom constitute reality.”[[13]] So far, continues Ravaisson, from all things operating by brute mechanism or by pure hazard, things operate by the development of a tendency to perfection, to goodness and beauty. Instead of everything submitting to a blind destiny, everything obeys, and obeys willingly, a divine Providence.
[13] Ibid., p. 270.
Ravaisson’s fundamental spiritualism is clear in all this, and it serves as the starting-point for the thinkers who follow him. Spiritualism is bound up with spontaneity, creation, freedom, and this is his central point, this insistence on freedom. While resisting mechanical determination he endeavours to retain a determination of another kind—namely, by ends, a teleology or finalism. This is extremely interesting when observed in relation to the subsequent development in Lachelier, Boutroux, Blondel and Bergson.
Lachelier’s treatment of freedom is an important landmark in the spiritualist development. By his concentrated analysis of the problem of induction he brought out the significance of efficient and final causes respectively. He appears as the pupil of Ravaisson, whose initial inspiration is apparent in his whole work, especially in his treatment of freedom. He dwells upon the fact of the spontaneity of the spirit—a point of view which Ravaisson succeeded in imparting to the three thinkers, Lachelier, Boutroux and Bergson. Besides the influence of Ravaisson, however, that of Kant and Leibnitz appears in Lachelier’s attitude to freedom. Yet he passes beyond the Kantian position, and he rejects the double-aspect doctrine which Leibnitz maintained with regard to efficient and final causes. Lachelier insists that the spontaneity of spirit stands above and underlies the whole of nature. This is the point which Boutroux, under Lachelier’s influence, took up in his Contingence des Lois de la Nature. Lachelier, in attacking the purely mechanistic conception of the universe, endeavoured, as he himself put it, “to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death and freedom for fatalism.” Rather than universal necessity it is universal contingence which is the real definition of existence. We are free to determine ourselves in accordance with ends we set before us, and to act in the manner necessary to accomplish those ends. Our life itself, as he shows in the conclusion of his brilliant little article Psychologie et Métaphysique, is creative, and we must beware of arguing that what we have been makes us what we are, for that character which we look upon as determining us need not do so if we free ourselves from habit, and, further, this character is, in any case, itself the result of our free actions over extended time, the free creation of our own personality.
While with Ravaisson and Lachelier the concept of freedom was being rather fully developed in opposition to the determinist doctrines, Fouillée, in his brilliant and acute thesis on Liberté et Déterminisme, endeavoured to call a halt to this supremacy of Freedom, and to be true to the principles of reconciliation which he laid down for himself in his philosophy. He confesses himself, at the outset, to be a pacifist rather than a belligerent in this classic dispute between determinists on the one hand and partisans of freedom on the other. He believes that, on intimate investigation pursued sufficiently far, the two opposing doctrines will be seen to converge. Such a declaration would seem to be dangerously superficial in a warfare as bitter and as sharp as this. It must be admitted that, as is the case with many who profess to conciliate two conflicting views, Fouillée leaves us at times without precise and definite indication of his own position.
In contrast to the attitude of Ravaisson and Lachelier Fouillée inclines in some respects to the attitude of Taine and many passages of his book show him to be holding at least a temporary brief for the partisans of determinism. He agrees notably with Taine in his objecting to the contention that under the determinist theory moral values lose their significance. Fouillée claims that it is both incorrect and unfair to argue that “under the necessity-hypothesis a thing being all that it can be is thereby all that it should be.”[[14]].
[14] La Liberté et le Déterminisme, p. 51 (fourth edition).