Modern French Philosophy: a Study of the Development Since Comte

by John Alexander Gunn

The foregoing pages have been devoted to a history of ideas rather than to the maintenance of any special thesis or particular argument. Consequently it does not remain for us to draw any definitely logical conclusions from the preceding chapters. The opportunity may be justly taken, however, of summing up the general features of the development.

Few periods in the history of human thought can rival in interest that of the second half of the nineteenth century in France. The discussion covers the principal problems with which man’s mind is occupied in modern times and presents these in a manner which is distinctly human and not merely national. This alone would give value to the study of such a period. There is, however, to be added the more striking fact that there is a complete “turning of the tide” manifested during these fifty years in the attitude to most of the problems. Beginning with an overweening confidence in science and a belief in determinism and in a destined progress, the century closed with a complete reversal of these conceptions.

Materialism and naturalism are both recognised as inadequate, a reaction sets in against positivism and culminates in the triumph of spiritualism or idealism. This idealism is free from the cruder aspects of the Kantian or Hegelian philosophy. The Thing-in-itself and the Absolute are abandoned; relativity is proclaimed in knowledge, and freedom in the world of action. Thoughts or ideas show themselves as forces operating in the evolution of history. This is maintained in opposition to the Marxian doctrine of the purely economic or materialistic determination of history. A marked tendency, however, is manifested to regard all problems from a social stand point. The dogmatic confidence in science gives way to a more philosophical attitude, while the conflict of science and religion resolves itself into a decay of dogma and the conception of a free religion.

We have indicated the problem presented by “science et conscience,” and in so far as we have laid down any thesis or argument in these pages, as distinct from an historical account of the development, that thesis has been, that the central problem in the period was that of freedom. It was to this point which the consideration of science, or rather of the sciences, led us. We have observed the importance of the sciences for philosophy, and it is clear that, so far from presenting any real hostility to philosophy, it can acclaim their autonomy and freedom, without attempting by abstract methods to absorb them into itself. They are equally a concrete part of human thought, and in a deep and real sense a manifestation of the same spirit which animates philosophy.

By recognising the sciences philosophy can avoid the fallacy of ideology on the one hand and naturalism on the other. Unlike the old eclecticism, the new thought is able to take account of science and to criticise its assertions. We have seen how this has been accomplished, and the rigidly mechanical view of the world abandoned for one into which human freedom enters as a real factor. This transforms the view of history and shows us human beings creating that history and not merely being its blind puppets. History offers no cheerful outlook for the easy-going optimist; it is not any more to be regarded as mere data for pessimistic reflections, but rather a record which prompts a feeling of responsibility. The world is not ready-made, and if there is to be progress it must be willed by us and achieved by our struggle and labour.

The doctrine of immanence upon which the modern tendency is to insist, in place of the older idea of transcendence, makes us feel, not only that we are free, but that our freedom is not in opposition to, or in spite of, the divine spirit, but is precisely an expression of divine immanence. Instead of the gloomy conception of a whole which determines itself apart from us, we feel ourselves part, and a very responsible part, of a reality which determines itself collectively and creatively by its own action, by its own ideals, which it has itself created. This freedom must extend not only to our conceptions of history but also to those of ethics and of religion.

“English philosophy ends in considering nature as an assemblage of facts; German philosophy looks upon it chiefly as a system of laws. If there is a place midway between the two nations it belongs to us Frenchmen. We applied the English ideas in the eighteenth century; we can in the nineteenth give precision to the German ideas. What we have to do is to temper, amend and complete the two spirits, one by the other, to fuse them into one, to express them in a style that shall be intelligible to everybody and thus to make of them the universal spirit.”

Such was Taine’s attitude, and it indicates clearly the precise position of French thought. We are apt to consider Taine purely as an empiricist, but we must remember that he disagreed with the radical empiricism of John Stuart Mill. His own attitude was largely that of a reaction against the vague spiritualism of the Eclectic School, especially Cousin’s eclecticism, a foreign growth on French soil, due to German influence. The purely a priori constructions of the older spiritualism could find no room, and allowed none, for the sciences. This was sufficient to doom it, and to lead naturally to a reaction of a positive kind, revolting from all a priori constructions.

It was to combat the excessive positive reaction against metaphysics that Renouvier devoted his energies, but while professing to modernise Kant and to follow out the general principles of his Critical Philosophy, Renouvier was further removed from the German thinker than he at times seems to have observed. Renouvier must undoubtedly share with Comte the honours of the century in French Philosophy. Many influences, however, prevented the general or speedy acceptance of Renouvier’s doctrines. The University was closed against him, as against Comte. He worked in isolation and his style of presentation, which is heavy and laborious, does not appeal to the esprit of the French mind. Probably, too, his countrymen’s ignorance of Kant at the time Renouvier wrote his Essais de Critique générale prevented an understanding and appreciation of the neo-critical advance on Criticism.

Renouvier commands respect, but he does not appear to be in the line of development which manifests so essentially the character of French thought. This is to be found rather in that spiritualism, which, unlike the old, does not exclude science, but welcomes it, finds a place for it, although not by any means an exclusive place. The new spiritualists did not draw their inspiration, as did Cousin, from any German source, their initial impulse is derived from a purely French thinker, Maine de Biran, who, long neglected, came to recognition in the work of Ravaisson and those subsequent thinkers of this group, right up to Bergson.