Initiation Into Philosophy The Nineteenth Century: France byFaguet, Émile
The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.
The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.
The Kantist School: Renouvier.
Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.
LAROMIGUIÈRE: ROYER-COLLARD.--Emerging from the school of Condillac,
France saw Laromiguière who was a sort of softened Condillac, less
trenchant, and not insensible to the influence of Rousseau; but he was
little more than a clear and elegant professor of philosophy. Royer-Collard
introduced into France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald
Stewart) and did not depart from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth
with magnificent authority and with a remarkable invention of clear and
magisterial formulae.
MAINE DE BIRAN.--Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself
to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been
interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of ego In full
reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to
the ego; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of
sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon,
elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for
Descartes, but from a fresh point of view, the voluntary deed is the
primitive deed of the soul and the will is the foundation of man. Also, the
will is not all man; man has, so to say, three lives superimposed but very
closely inter-united and which cannot do without one another: the life of
sensation, the life of will, and the life of love. The life of sensation is
almost passive, with a commencement of activity which consists in
classifying and organizing the sensations; the life of will is properly
speaking the "human" life; the life of love is the life of activity and yet
again of will, but which unites the human with the divine life. By the
ingenious and profound subtlety of his analyses, Maine de Biran has placed
himself in the front rank of French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of
the most original.
VICTOR COUSIN AND HIS DISCIPLES.--Victor Cousin, who appears to have
been influenced almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, and
the German philosophy, yielded rapidly to a tendency which is
characteristically French and is also, perhaps, good, and which consists in
seeing "some good in all the opinions," and he was eclectic, that is, a
borrower. His maxim, which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, was that the
systems are "true in what they affirm and false in what they deny."
Starting thence, he rested upon both the English and German philosophy,
correcting one by the other. Personally his tendency was to make
metaphysics come from philosophy and to prove God by the human soul and the
relations of God with the world by the relations of man with matter. To him
God is always an augmented human soul. All philosophies, not to mention all
religions, have rather an inclination to consider things thus: but this
tendency is particularly marked in Cousin. In the course of his career,
which was diversified, for he was at one time a professor and at another a
statesman, he varied somewhat, because before 1830 he became very Hegelian,
and after 1830 he harked back towards Descartes, endeavouring especially to
make philosophic instruction a moral priesthood; highly cautious, very
well-balanced, feeling great distrust of the unassailable temerities of the
one and in sympathetic relations with the other. What has remained of this
eclecticism is an excellent thing, the great regard for the history
of philosophy, which had never been held in honour in France and which,
since Cousin, has never ceased to be so.
The principal disciples of Cousin were Jouffroy, Damiron, Emile Saisset,
and the great moralist Jules Simon, well-known because of the important
political part he played.
LAMENNAIS.--Lamennais, long celebrated for his great book, Essay
on Indifference in the Matter of Religion then, when he had severed
himself from Rome, by his Words of a Believer and other works of
revolutionary spirit, was above all a publicist; but he was a philosopher,
properly speaking, in his Sketch of a Philosophy To him, God is
neither the Creator, as understood by the early Christians, nor the Being
from whom the world emanates, as others have thought. He has not created
the world from nothing; but He has created it; He created it from Himself,
He made it issue from His substance; and He made it issue by a purely
voluntary act. He created it in His own image; it is not man alone who is
in the image of God, but the whole world. The three Persons of God, that
is, the three characteristics, power, intelligence, and love are
found--diminished and disfigured indeed, but yet are to be found--in every
being in the universe. They are especially our own three powers, under the
form of will, reason, sympathy; they are also the three powers of society,
under the forms of executive power, deliberation, and fraternity. Every
being, individual or collective, has in it a principle of death if it
cannot reproduce however imperfectly all the three terms of this trinity
without the loss of one.
AUGUSTE COMTE.--Auguste Comte, a mathematician, versed also in all
sciences, constructed a pre-eminently negative philosophy in spite of his
great pretension to replace the negations of the eighteenth century by a
positive doctrine; above all else he denied all authority and denied to
metaphysics the right of existence. Metaphysics ought not to exist, do not
exist, are a mere nothing. We know nothing, we can know nothing, about the
commencement or the end of things, or yet their essence or their object;
philosophy has always laid down as its task a general explanation of the
universe; it is precisely this general explanation, all general explanation
of the aggregate of things, which is impossible. This is the negative part
of "positivism." It is the only one which has endured and which is the
credo or rather the non credo of a fairly large number of
minds.
The affirmative part of the ideas of Comte was this: what can be done is to
make a classification of sciences and a philosophy of history. The
classification of sciences according to Comte, proceeding from the most
simple to the most complex--that is, from mathematics to astronomy,
physics, chemistry, biology to end at sociology, is generally considered by
the learned as interesting but arbitrary. The philosophy of history,
according to Comte, is this: humanity passes through three states:
theological, metaphysical, positive. The theological state (antiquity)
consists in man explaining everything by continual miracles; the
metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by
ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by
abstractions, entities, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul,
faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains
and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit
himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with one
another, links he will content himself with observing and subsequently with
controlling by experiment. Also there is always something of the succeeding
state in the preceding state and the ancients did not ignore observation,
and there is always something of the preceding state in the succeeding
state and we have still theological and metaphysical habits of mind,
theological and metaphysical "residues," and perhaps it will be always
thus; but for theology to decline before metaphysics and metaphysics before
science is progress.
Over and above this, Comte in the last portion of his life--as if to prove
his doctrine of residues and to furnish an example--founded a sort of
religion, a pseudo-religion, the religion of humanity. Humanity must be
worshipped in its slow ascent towards intellectual and moral perfection
(and, in consequence, we should specially worship humanity to come; but
Comte might reply that humanity past and present is venerable because it
bears in its womb the humanity of the future). The worship of this new
religion is the commemoration and veneration of the dead. These last
conceptions, fruits of the sensibility and of the imagination of Auguste
Comte, have no relation with the basis of his doctrine.
RENOUVIER.--After him, by a vigorous reaction, Renouvier restored
the philosophy of Kant, depriving it of its too symmetrical, too minutely
systematic, too scholastic character and bringing it nearer to facts; from
him was to come the doctrine already mentioned, "pragmatism," which
measures the truth of every idea by the moral consequence that it contains.
TAINE.--Very different and attaching himself to the general ideas of
Comte, Hippolyte Taine believed only in what has been observed,
experimented, and demonstrated; but being also as familiar with Hegel as
with Comte, with Spencer as with Condillac, he never doubted that the need
of going beyond and escaping from oneself was also a fact, a human fact
eternal among humanity, and of this fact he took account as of a fact
observed and proved, saying if man is on one side a "fierce and lascivious
gorilla," on the other side he is a mystic animal, and that in "a double
nature, mysterious hymen," as Hugo wrote, lay the explanation of all the
baseness in ideas and actions as well as all the sublimity in ideas and
actions of humanity. Personally he was a Stoic and his practice was the
continuous development of the intelligence regarded as the condition and
guarantee of morality.
RENAN.--Renan, destined for the ecclesiastical profession and always
preserving profound traces of his clerical education, was, nevertheless, a
Positivist and believed only in science, hoping everything from it in youth
and continuing to venerate it at least during his mature years. Thus
formed, a "Christian Positivist," as has been said, as well as a poet above
all else, he could not proscribe metaphysics and had a weakness for them
with which perhaps he reproached himself. He extricated himself from this
difficulty by declaring all metaphysical conceptions to be only "dreams,"
but sheltered, so to say, by this concession he had made and this
precaution he had taken, he threw himself into the dream with all his heart
and reconstituted God, the immortal soul, the future existence, eternity
and creation, giving them new, unforeseen, and fascinating names. It was
only the idea of Providence--that is, of the particular and circumstantial
intervention of God in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and
against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "God
does not act by particular wills." And yet he paid a compliment, which
seems sincere, to the idea of grace, and if there be a particular and
circumstantial intervention by God in human affairs, it is certainly grace
according to all appearances.
He was above all an amateur of ideas, a dilettante in ideas, toying with
them with infinite pleasure, like a superior Greek sophist, and in all
French philosophy no one calls Plato to mind more than he does.
He possessed a charming mind, a very lofty character, and was a marvellous
writer.
TO-DAY.--The living French philosophers whom we shall content
ourselves with naming because they are living and receive contemporary
criticism rather than that of history, are MM. Fouillée, Théodule Ribot,
Liard, Durckheim, Izoulet, and Bergson.
THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY.--It is impossible to forecast in what
direction philosophy will move. The summary history we have been able to
trace sufficiently shows, as it seems to us, that it has no regular advance
such that by seeing how it has progressed one can conjecture what path it
will pursue. It seems in no sense to depend, or at all events, to depend
remarkably little, at any period, on the general state of civilization
around it, and even for those who believe in a philosophy of history there
is not, as it appears to me, a philosophy of the history of philosophy. The
only thing that can be affirmed is that philosophy will always exist in
response to a need of the human mind, and that it will always be both an
effort to gather scientific discoveries into some great general ideas and
an effort to go beyond science and to seek as it can the meaning of the
universal enigma; so that neither philosophy, properly speaking, nor even
metaphysics will ever disappear. Nietzsche has said that life is valuable
only as the instrument of knowledge. However eager humanity may be and
become for branches of knowledge, it will be always passionately and
indefatigably anxious about complete knowledge.
