He goes on to point out that the consciousness of independence, which is an essential of freedom, may be nothing more than a lack of consciousness of our dependence. Motives he is inclined to speak of as determining the will itself, while he looks upon the “liberty of indifference” or of hazard as merely a concession to the operations of mechanical necessity. The “liberty of indifference” is often the mere play of instinct and of fatality, while hazard, so far from being an argument in the hands of the upholders of freedom, is really a determination made previously by something other than one’s own will.
This is a direct attack upon the doctrines put forward by both Cournot and Renouvier. Fouillée is well aware of this, and twenty pages of his thesis are devoted to a critical and hostile examination of the statements of both Renouvier and his friend Lequier.[[15]] Fouillée claims that these two thinkers have only disguised and misplaced the “liberty of indifference”; they have not, he thinks, really suppressed it, although both of them profess to reject it absolutely. A keen discussion between Fouillée and Renouvier arose from this and continued for some time, being marked on both sides by powerful dialectic. Renouvier used his paper the Critique philosophique as his medium, while Fouillée continued in subsequent editions of his thesis, in his Idée moderne du Droit and also in his acute study Critique des Systèmes de Morale contemporains. Fouillée took Renouvier to task particularly for his maintaining that if all be determined then truth and error are indistinguishable. Fouillée claims that the distinction between truth and error is by no means parallel to that between necessity and freedom. An error may, he points out, be necessitated, and consequently we must look elsewhere for our doctrine of certitude than to the affirmation of freedom. In the philosophy of Renouvier, as we have seen, these two are intimately connected. Fouillée criticises the neo-critical doctrine of freedom on the ground that Renouvier mars his thought by a tendency to look upon the determinist as a passive and inert creature. This, he says, is “the argument of laziness” applied to the intelligence. “One forgets,” says Fouillée, “that if intelligence is a mirror, it is not an immovable and powerless mirror: it is a mirror always turning itself to reality.”[[16]]
[15] Ibid., pp. 117-137.
[16] La Liberté et le Déterminisme, p. 129.
On examining closely the difference between Renouvier and Fouillée over this problem of freedom, we may attribute it to the fact that while the one thinker is distinctly and rigorously an upholder of continuity, the other believes in no such absolute continuity. For Fouillée there is, in a sense, nothing new under the sun, while Renouvier in his thought, which has been well described as a philosophy of discontinuity, has a place for new things, real beginnings, and he is in this way linked up to the doctrine of creative development as set forth ultimately by Bergson. It will be seen also as we proceed that Fouillée, for all he has to say on behalf of determinism, is not so widely separated in his view of freedom from that worked out by Bergson, although at the first glance the gulf between them seems a wide one.
Fouillée, while attacking Renouvier, did not spare that other acute thinker, Lachelier, from the whip of his criticism. He takes objection to a passage in that writer’s Induction where he advocates the doctrine that the production of ideas “is free in the most rigorous sense of that word, since each idea is in itself absolutely independent of that which precedes it, and is born out of nothing, as is a world.” To this view of the spontaneity of the spirit Fouillée opposes the remark that Lachelier is considering only the new forms which are assumed by a mechanism which is always operating under the same laws of causality. He asks us in this connection to imagine a kaleidoscope which is being turned round. The images which succeed each other will be in this sense a formal creation, a form independent of that which went before, but, as he is anxious to remind us, the same mechanical and geometrical laws will be operating continually in producing these forms.
Having had these encounters with the upholders of freedom, and thus to some degree having conveyed the impression of being on the side of the determinists, Fouillée proceeds to the task he had set himself—namely, that of reconciliation. He felt the unsatisfactoriness of Kant’s treatment of freedom,[[17]] and he endeavours to remedy the lack in Kant of a real link between the determinism of the natural sciences and the human consciousness of freedom, realised in the practical reason. Fouillée proposes to find in his idées-forces a middle term and to offer us a solution of the problem at issue in the dispute.
[17] See above, p. 136.
He begins by showing that there has been an unfortunate neglect of one important factor in the case—a factor whose reality is frankly admitted by both parties. This central, incontestable fact is the idea of freedom. This idea, according to Fouillée, arises in us as the result Of a combination of various psychological factors, such as notions of diversity, possibility, with the tendency to action arising from the notion of action, which thus shows itself as a force. The combination of these results in the genesis of the idea of freedom. Now the stronger this idea of freedom is in our minds the more we make it become a reality. It is an “idea-force” which by being thought tends to action and thus increases in power and fruitfulness. The idea of freedom becomes, by a kind of determinism, more powerful in proportion to the degree with which it is acted upon. Determinism thus reflects upon itself and in a curious way turns to operate against itself. This directing power of the idea of freedom cannot be denied even by the most rigorous upholders of determinism. They at least are forced to find room in their doctrine for the idea of freedom and its practical action on the lives of men, both individually and in societies. The vice of the doctrines of determinism has been the refusal to admit the reality of the liberating idea of freedom, which is tending always to realise itself.
The belief in freedom is, therefore, Fouillée claims, a powerful force in the world. Nothing is a more sure redeemer of men and societies from evil ways than the realisation of this idea of freedom. So largely is this the case that indeed the extinction of the belief in freedom would, he argues, not differ much in consequence from the finding that freedom was an illusion, or, if it be a fact, its abolition.