He combats also the modern doctrines of “nationality,” and claims that even the idea of the state is a higher one, for it at any rate involves co-operating personalities, while a nation is a fiction, of which no satisfactory definition can be given. He laughs at the “unity of language, race, culture and religion,” and asks where we can find a nation?[[26]] War and death have long since destroyed such united and harmonious groups as were found in ancient times.
[27] Science de la Morale, vol. 2, chap. xcvi, “Idées de la Nationalité et d’Etat,” pp. 416-427.
In approaching the questions of international morality Renouvier makes clear that there is only one morality, one code of justice. Morality cannot be divided against itself, and there cannot be an admission that things which are immoral in the individual are justifiable, or permissible, between different states. Morality has not been applied to these relationships, which are governed by aggressive militarism and diplomacy, the negation of all conceptions of justice. Ethical obligation has only a meaning and significance for personalities, and our states do but reflect the morality of those who constitute them; our world reflects the relationships and immorality of the states. War characterises our whole civilisation, domestic, economic and international. To have inter- national peace, internal peace is essential, and this pre- supposes the reign of justice within states. War we shall have with us, Renouvier reminds us, in all its forms, in our institutions, our laws and customs, until it has disappeared from our hearts. Treaties of “peace” and federations or leagues of nations are themselves based on injustice and on force, and in this he sees but another instance of the “terrible solidarity of evil.”[[28]] Better it is to recognise this, thinks Renouvier, than to consider ourselves in, or even near, a Utopia, whence human greed and passion have fled.
[28] Science de la Morale, vol. 2, p. 474.
We find in Renouvier’s ethics a notable reversion to the individualism which characterised the previous century. Much of the individualistic tone of his work is, however, due to his finding himself in opposition to the doctrines preached by communists, positivists, sociologists, pessimistic and fatalistic historians, and supporters of the deified state. Renouvier acclaims the freedom of the individual, but his individualism is “personalism.” In proclaiming that the basis of justice and of all morality is respect for personality, as such, he has no desire to set up a standard of selfish individualism; he wishes only to combat those heretical doctrines which would minimise and crush personality. For him the moral “person” is not an isolated individual—he is a social human being, free and responsible, who lives with his fellows in society. Only upon a recognition of personality as a supreme value can justice or peace ever be attained in human society; and it is to this end that all moral education, Renouvier advocates, should tend. The moral ideal should be, in practice, the constant effort to free man from the terrible solidarity of evil which characterises the civilisation into which he is born, and to establish a community or association of personalities. Such an ideal does not lie necessarily at the end of a determined evolution; Renouvier’s views on history and progress have shown us that. Consequently it depends upon us; it is our duty to believe in its possibility and to work, each according to his or her power, for its realisation. The ideal or the idea, will, in so far as it is set before self-conscious personalities as an end, become a force. Renouvier agrees on this point with Fouillée, to whose ethic, founded on the conception of idées-forces, we now turn.
III
The philosophy of idée-forces propounded by Fouillée assumes, in its ethical aspect, a role of reconciliation (which is characteristic, as we have noted, of his whole method and his entire philosophy) by attempting a synthesis of individualism and humanitarianism. It is therefore another kind of personnalisme, differing in type from that of Renouvier. Fouillée’s full statement of his ethical doctrines was not written until the year 1907,[[29]] but long before the conclusion of the nineteenth century he had already indicated the essential points of his ethics. The conclusion of his thesis La Liberté et le Déterminisme (1872) is very largely filled with his ethical views and with his optimism. Four years later appeared his study L’Idée moderne du Droit en Allemagne, en Angleterre et en France, which was followed in 1880 by La Science sociale contemporaine, where the relation of the study of ethics to that of sociology was discussed. A volume containing much acute criticism of current ethical theories was his Critique des Systèmes de Morale contemporains (1883), which gave him a further opportunity of offering by way of contrast his application of the doctrine of idées-forces to the solution of moral problems. To this he added in the following year a study upon La Propriété sociale et la Démocratie, where he discussed the ethical value and significance of various political and socialist doctrines. Ethical questions raised by the problems of education he discussed in his L’Enseignement au Point de Vue national (1891). At the close of the century he issued his book on morality in his own country, La France au Point de Vue morale (1900).[[30]]
[29] His Morale des Idées-forces was then published.
[30] It is interesting to note the wealth of Fouillée’s almost annual output on ethics alone in his later years. We may cite, in the twentieth century: La Réforme de l’Enseignement par la Philosophie, 1901; La Conception morale et critique de l’Enseignement; Nietzsche et l’Immoralisme, 1904; Le Moralisme de Kant et l’Amoralisme contemporaine, 1905; Les Eléments sociologiques de la Morale, 1905; La Morale des Idées-forces, 1907; Le Socialisme, 1910; La Démocratie politique et sociale en France, 1910; and the posthumous volume, Humanitaires et Libertaires au Point de Vue sociologique et morale, 1914.
Fouillée endeavours to unite the purely ideal aspect of ethics—that is to say, its notion of what ought to be, with the more positive view of ethics as dealing with what now is. His ethic is, therefore, an attempt to relate more intimately the twin spheres of Renouvier, l’état de guerre with l’état de paix, for it is concerned not only with what is, but with that which tends to be and which can be by the simple fact that it is thought. As, however, what can be is a matter of intense interest to us, we are inevitably led from this to consider what ought to be—that is to say, what is better, or of more worth or value. The ethical application of the philosophy of idées-forces is at once theoretical and practical, that philosophy being concerned both with ideas and values.