[52] Ibid. pp. 245–246.
[53] I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,” provided only that the “moral” in our experience is not too rigidly separated from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a “reality” that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, [p. 223], where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience directly.
[54] Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.
[58] For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the “Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older “intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be ‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.’ Man uses science but he lives religion. The part cannot replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines for her own convenience.” (p. 329).
[59] Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr. Schiller’s review in Mind, July 1911) the acquaintance of the important work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including” and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon Action.
[60] Fouillée speaks in his book upon the Idealist Movement and the Reaction against Positive Science of the year 1851, as the time of the triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.
[61] See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, La Psychologie des idées-forces (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that anticipates even Bergson, namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is furthered or impeded. But Fouillée’s works out in this book the active of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental life itself, refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.