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While Taine had indeed maintained the necessity of a metaphysic, he shared to a large degree the general confidence in science displayed by Comte, Bernard, Berthelot and Renan. But the second and third groups of thinkers into which we have divided our period took up first a critical attitude to science and, finally, a rather hostile one.
Cournot marks the transition between Comte and Renouvier. His Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances et sur les Caractères de la Critique philosophique contains some very calm and careful thought on the relation of science and philosophy, which is the product of a sincere and well-balanced mind.* He inherits from the positivists an intense respect for scientific knowledge, and remarks at the outset that he is hostile to any philosophy which would be so foolish as to attempt to ignore the work of the modern sciences.
[Footnote * : See in particular the second chapter of vol. 2, Du Contraste de la Science et de la Philosophie et de la Philosophie des Sciences, pp. 216-255.]
His work Matérialisme, Vitalisme, Rationalisme is a striking example of this effort on Cournot's part, being devoted to a study of the use which can be made in philosophy of the data afforded by the sciences. Somewhat after the manner of Comte, Cournot looks upon the various sciences as a hierarchy ranging from mathematics to sociology. Yet he reminds the scientists of the insufficiency of their point of view, for the sciences, rightly pursued, lead on to philosophy. He laments, however, the confusion of the two, and thinks that such confusion is "partly due to the fact that in the realm of speculations which are naturally within the domain of the philosopher, there are to be found here and there certain theories which can actually be reduced to a scientific form"* He offers, as an instance of this, the theory of the syllogism, which has affinities to algebraical equations—but this interpenetration should not cause us, he argues, to abandon or to lose sight of the distinction between science and philosophy.
[Footnote * : Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances, vol. 2, p. 224.]
This distinction, according to Cournot, lies in the fact that science has for its object that which can be measured, and that which can be reduced to a rigorous chain or connection. In brief, science is characterised by quantity. Philosophy, on the other hand, concerns itself with quality, for it endeavours not so much to measure as to appreciate.
Cournot reminds the apostles of science that quantity, however intimately bound up with reality it may be, is not the essence of that reality itself. He is afraid, too, that the neglect of philosophy by science may cause the latter to develop along purely utilitarian lines. As an investigation of reality, science is not ultimate. It has limits by the fact that it is concerned with measurement, and thus is excluded from those things which are qualitative and incapable of quantitative expression. Science, moreover, has its roots in philosophy by virtue of the metaphysical postulates which it utilises as its basis. Physics and geometry, Cournot maintains, both rest upon definitions which owe their origin to speculative thought rather than to experience, yet these sciences claim an absolute value for themselves and for those postulates as being descriptions of reality in an ultimate sense.
Following out his distinction between philosophy and the sciences, Cournot claims in a Kantian manner that while the latter are products of the human understanding the former is due to the operation of reason. This apparent dualism Cournot does not shrink from maintaining; indeed, he makes it an argument for his doctrine of discontinuity. The development of a science involves a certain breach with reality, for the progress of the science involves abstraction, which ever becomes more complicated. Cournot here brings out the point which we noticed was stressed by Renan.*
[Footnote * : See above, p. 105.]
Reason produces in us the idea of order, and this "idea of order and of reason in things is the basis of philosophic probability, of induction and analogy."† This has important bearings upon the unity of science and upon the conception of causality which it upholds. In a careful examination of the problems of induction and analogy, Cournot emphasises the truth that there are facts which cannot be fitted into a measured or logical sequence of events. Reality cannot be fitted into a formula or into concepts, for these fail to express the infinite variety and richness of the reality which displays itself to us. Science can never be adequate to life, with its pulsing spontaneity and freedom. It is philosophy with its vue d'ensemble which tries to grasp and to express this concreteness, which the sciences, bound to their systematic connection of events within separate compartments, fail to reach or to show us. Referring to the ideas of beauty and of goodness, Cournot urges a "transrationalism," as he calls it, which, while loyal to the rational requirements of science, will enable us to take the wider outlook assumed by philosophy.‡
[Footnote † : Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances, p. 384.]
[Footnote ‡ : The parallelism of some of Cournot's ideas here with those expressed by Bergson, although they have been enunciated by the later thinker in a more decided manner, is so obvious as hardly to need to be indicated.]
Like Cournot, the author of the Essais de Critique générale was a keen antagonist of all those who sought to deify Science. It was indeed this which led Renouvier to give this title to his great work, the first part of which was published at a time when the confidence in Science appeared to be comparatively unassailed. We find him defending philosophy as against the scientists and others by an insistence upon its critical function.
In examining Comte's positivism in his work Histoire et Solution des Problèmes métaphysiques, Renouvier points out that its initial idea is a false one—namely, that philosophy can be constituted by an assembling together of the sciences.* Such an assembly does not, he objects, make a system. Each science has its own postulates, its own data, and Science as a whole unity of thought or knowledge does not exist. He attacks at the same time the calm presumption of the positivist who maintains that the scientific stage is the final and highest development. Renouvier is considerably annoyed at this unwarranted dogmatism and assumed air of finality.
[Footnote * : Book X.: De l'Etat actuel de la Philosophie en France, chap. 1., De l'Aboutissement des Esprits au Positivisme, pp. 416-417.]
Owing to the excellent training he had received at the Ecole Polytechnique, and by his own profound study, Renouvier was able on many technical points to meet the scientists on their own ground. His third Essai de Critique générale is devoted to a study of "the Principles of Nature," in which he criticises many of the principles and assumptions of mechanism, while many pages of his two previous Essais are concerned with the discussion of questions intimately affecting the sciences.†
[Footnote † : This is particularly noticeable in the matter printed as appendices to his chapters. (Cf. the Logic, vol 2.)]
An important section of his second Essay, Psychologie rationnelle, deals with the "Classification of the Sciences."‡ Renouvier there points out that the attempt to classify the sciences in accordance with their degrees of certainty ends in failure. All of them, when loyal to their own principles, endeavour to display equal certainty. By loyalty Renouvier shows that he means adherence to an examination of certain classes of phenomena, the observation of facts and laws, with the proposal of hypotheses, put forward frankly as such. He draws a line between the logical and the physical sciences—a division which he claims is not only a division according to the nature of their data, but also according to method. Following another division, we may draw a line between sciences which deal with objects which are organic, living creatures, and those which are not.
[Footnote ‡ : Vol. 2, chap. xviii., De la Certitude des Sciences et leur Classification rationnelle, pp. 139-186, including later observations on Spencer]
Renouvier's line is not, it must be remembered in this connection, a purely imaginary one. It is a real line, an actual gap. For him there is a real discontinuity in the universe. Taine's doctrine of a universal explanation, of a rigid unity and continuity, is, for Renouvier, anathema, c'est la mathématisation a l'outrance. This appears most markedly in the pages which he devotes to the consideration of la synthèse totale.
An important section of his Traité de Logique (the first Essai de Critique générale) deals with the problem of this Total Synthesis of all phenomena.* This is a conception which Renouvier affirms to be unwarrantable and, indeed, in the last analysis impossible. A general synthesis, an organisation or connected hierarchy of sciences, is a fond hope, an illusion only of a mind which can overlook the real discontinuity which exists between things and between groups of things.
[Footnote: Vol. I, pp. 107-115, and also vol. 2, pp. 202-245.]
He sees in it the fetish of the Absolute and the Infinite and the lure of pantheism, a doctrine to which he opposes his "Personalism." He reminds the scientists that personality is the great factor to which all knowledge is related, and that all knowledge is relative. A law is a law, but the guarantee of its permanence is not a law. It is no more easy, claims Renouvier, to say why phenomena do not stop than it is to know why they have begun. Laws indeed abide, but "not apart from conscious personalities who affirm them."† Further, attacking the self-confident and dogmatic attitude in the scientists, Renouvier reminds them that it is impossible to demonstrate every proposition; and in an important note on "Induction and the Sciences"* he points out that induction always implies a certain croyance. This is no peculiar, mystical thing; it is a fact, he remarks, which colours all the interesting acts of human personality. He here approaches Cournot in observing that all speculation is attended by a certain coefficient of doubt or uncertainty and so becomes really rational belief. With Cournot, too, Renouvier senses the importance of analogy and probability in connection with hypotheses in the world of nature and of morals. In short, he recognises as central the problem of freedom.
[Footnote † : Logique, vol. 2, p. 321.]
[Footnote * : Note B to chap. xxxv. of the Logique, vol. 2, p. 13.]
Renouvier attacks Comte's classification or "hierarchy" of the sciences as mischievous and inexact. It is not based, he claims, upon any distinction in method, nor of data. It is not true that the sciences are arranged by Comte in an order where they successively imply one another, nor in an order in which they have come to be constituted as "positive".†
[Footnote †: This outburst of attack is a sample of Renouvier's usual attitude to Positivism. (Deuxième Essai, vol. 2, pp. 166-170.)]
He justifies to the scientist the formulation of hypothesis as a necessary working method of co-ordinating in a provisional manner varying phenomena. Many hypotheses and inductions of science are, however, unjustifiable from a strictly logical standpoint, Renouvier reminds us. His chief objection, however, is that those hypotheses and inductions are put forward so frequently as certainties by a science which is dogmatic and surpasses its limits.
Science, Renouvier claims, does not give us a knowledge of the absolute, but an understanding of the relative. It is in the light of his doctrine of relativity and of the application of the law of number that he criticises many of the attitudes adopted by the scientists. Whatever savours of the Absolute or the Infinite he opposes, and his view of cause depends on this. He scorns the fiction of an infinite regress, and affirms real beginnings to various classes of phenomena. Causality is not to be explained, he urges in his Nouvelle Monadologie, save by a harmony. He differs from Leibnitz, however, in claiming in the interests of freedom that this harmony is not pre-established. In meeting the doctrine of the reduction of the complex to the simple, Renouvier cites the case of "reducing" sound, heat, light and electricity to movement. This may be superficially correct as a generality, but Renouvier aptly points out that it overlooks the fact that, although they may all be abstractly characterised as movement, yet there are differences between them as movements which correspond to the differences of sensation they arouse in us.
Renouvier upholds real differences, real beginnings, and, it must be added, a reality behind and beyond the appearances of nature. His Monadologie admits that "we can continue to explain nature mathematically and mechanically, provided we recognise that it is an external appearance—that thought, mind or spirit is at the heart of it." This links Renouvier to the group of new spiritualists. His attitude to science is akin to theirs. He does not fear science when it confines itself to its proper limits and recognises these. It has no quarrel with philosophy nor philosophy with it. Advance in science involves, he believes, an advance also in theology and in metaphysics.
The sciences are responsible for working out the laws determining the development of the Universe. But between Science, an ideal unachieved, and the sciences which in themselves are so feeble, imperfect and limited, Renouvier claims that General Criticism, or Philosophy, has its place. "In spite of the discredit into which philosophy has fallen in these days, it can and ought to exist. Its object has been always the investigation of God, man, liberty, immortality, the fundamental laws of the sciences. 'All these intimately connected and interpenetrating problems comprise the domain of philosophy." In those cases where no science is possible, this seeming impossibility must itself be investigated, and philosophy remains as a "General Criticism" (Critique générale) of our knowledge. "It is this notion," he says, "which I desired to indicate by banishing the word 'Philosophy' from the title of my Essays. The name ought to change when the method changes."* Thus Renouvier seeks to establish a "critique" midway between scepticism and dogmatism, and endeavours to found a philosophy which recognises at one and the same time the demands of science et conscience.
[Footnote * : Logique, vol. 2, p. 352.]