John Alexander Gunn

“ We can become better acquainted with reality only by the progressive development of science and philosophy. We cannot live on the dry bread of the sciences alone, an intuitional philosophy is necessary for our spiritual welfare. Science promises us well-being or pleasure, but philosophy, claims Bergson, can give us joy, by its intuitions, its super-intellectual vision, that vital contact with life itself in its fulness, which is far grander and truer than all the abstractions of science. ”

“ Confidence in both has been shaken, and both, Renouvier asserts, will disappear and give place to a real democracy, not only to republics on earth, but to the conception of the whole universe as a republic. Men raise up saints and intercessors to bridge the gulf between the divine Monarch and his slaves. They conceive angels as doing his work in heaven; they tolerate priests to bring down grace to them here and now. The doctrine of unity thus gives rise to fanatical religious devotion or philosophical belief in the absolute, which stifles religion and perishes in its own turn. ”

“ There is at work no doubt a principle of conservation, but this must not lead us to deny the existence and action of another principle, that of creation. The world rises from inorganic to organic forms, from matter to spirit, and in man himself from mere sensibility to intelligence, with its capacity for criticising and observing, and to will capable of acting upon things and modifying them by freedom.
Boutroux inclines to a doctrine of finalism somewhat after the manner of Ravaisson. The world he conceives as attracted to an end; the beautiful and the good are ideals seeking to be realised ”

“ Again, Pantheism tends to speak of the perfection of individuals, and speaks loudly of progress from one generation to another. But it tells only of a future which involves the entire sacrifice of all that has worth or value in the past. It shows endless sacrifice, improvement too, but all for naught. “What does it matter to say that the best is yet to be, if the best must perish as the good, to give place to a yet better ‘best’ which will not have the virtue of enduring any more than the others? ”

“ By a survey of laws of various types, logical, mathematical, mechanical, physical, chemical, biological, psychological and sociological, Boutroux endeavours to show that they are constructions built up from facts. Just as nature offers to the scientist facts for data, so the sciences themselves offer these natural laws as data to the philosopher, for his constructed explanation of things which is metaphysics or philosophy.
“In the actual condition of our knowledge,” he remarks, “science is not one, but multiple; science, conceived as embracing all the sciences, is a mere abstraction.” ”

“ The pearl is the spirit which is the end, the final cause and last result, and assuredly the most brilliant outcome of this universe. Through suffering the pearl is formed; and likewise, through constant pain and conflict, suffering and hardship, the spirit of man moves intellectually and morally onward and upward, to the completed realisation of justice, beauty, truth and infinite goodness and love, to the complete and triumphant realisation of God. ”

“ It is upon this sense of the infinite and upon the ideals of Goodness, Beauty and Love that true faith or piety reposes.
Love, declares Renan, is one of the principal revelations of the divine, and he laments the neglect of it by philosophy. It runs in a certain sense through all living beings, and in man has been the school of gentleness and courtesy—nay more, of morals and of religion. Love, understood in the high sense, is a sacred, religious thing, or rather is a part of religion itself. ”

“ We must not think it religious to despise the body or material welfare. God manifests Himself as matter and spirit, so Religion must not despise economics but rather unite industry and science as Love unites spirit and matter. Eternal Life, of which Christianity makes so much, is not to be sought, argued Saint-Simon, in another world, but here and now in the love and service of our brothers, in the uplift of humanity as a whole. ”

“ This is the point which Boutroux, under Lachelier’s influence, took up in his Contingence des Lois de la Nature. Lachelier, in attacking the purely mechanistic conception of the universe, endeavoured, as he himself put it, “to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death and freedom for fatalism.” Rather than universal necessity it is universal contingence which is the real definition of existence. We are free to determine ourselves in accordance with ends we set before us, and to act in the manner necessary to accomplish those ends. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The doctrine of freedom as represented by that of an indifferent will is no less vicious, Renouvier affirms, than the opposing doctrine of universal necessity. The truth is that they both rest on fictions. “Indifferentism” imagines a will divorced from judgment, separated from the rational man himself, an unseizable power, a mysterious absolute cause unconnected with reflection or deliberation, a mere chimera. For determinism the will is equally a fiction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The human consciousness protests against annihilation. At times this is very keenly expressed. “At the period of the great aspirations of the heart, the ecstasy of noble passions is accompanied by the conviction of Immortality. Life at its highest, realising its richest personality, protests, in virtue of its own worth, and in the name of the depths of power it still feels latent in itself, against the menace of annihilation.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then came the morality of reciprocity, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” an ethic which represented a high ideal for primitive man to reach, and one to which, Guyau thinks, we have yet to reach to-day in some spheres of life. Yet a further moral development will show how foolish, in a civilised society, are wrath and hatred of the criminal and the cry for vengeance. Society must aim at ensuring protection for itself with the minimum of individual suffering. Punishment must be regarded as an example for the future rather than as revenge or compensation. ”

“ We must, however, present to ourselves Immortality as given by the development of appearances in this world of phenomena, under the general laws with which we are acquainted to-day, thus correcting the method of Kant, who placed Immortality in a noumenal world. The salvation of a philosopher should not be of such a kind. We must treat Immortality as a Law, not as a miracle. The thinker who accepts the latter view quits the realm of science—that is, of experience and reason—to establish a mystic order in contradiction with the laws of nature. ”

“ He draws a touching picture of the sacrifice upon which our modern social life and civilisation are based, and draws an analogy between the blood of dead horses used by the ploughman in fertilising his field, and the blood of the martyrs of humanity, qui ont fécondé l’avenir. Often they may have been mistaken; later generations may wonder if their cause was worth fighting for; yet, although nothing truly is sadder than to die in vain, that devotion was valuable in and for itself.
With the demand of life for risk in action is bound up the impetus to undertake risk in thought. ”

“ In reality there is no plan; every worker conceives his own. The world is a superb example, not of order, such as we associate with the idea of Providence in action, but the reverse, disorder, the result of contingency and freedom.
The supreme emphasis upon the reality of freedom appears, however, in the work of Boutroux and of Bergson at the end of our period. They arrive at a position diametrically opposed to that of the upholders of determinism, by their doctrines of contingency as revealed both in the evolution of the universe and in the realm of personal life. ”

“ He sees that the doctrine of progress as usually stated is not only a lie, but that it is an extremely dangerous one, for it justifies the past, or at least condones it as inevitable, and thus makes evil a condition of goodness, demoralises history, nullifies ethics and encourages the damnation of humanity itself. This fatalistic doctrine, asserts Renouvier with great earnestness, must be abandoned; freedom must be recognised as operative, and the human will as making history.There is no law of progress, and the sooner humanity can come to realise this the better it will be for it. ”

“ We do not know humanity’s beginning and primitive history, nor do we know its goal, if it has one. These factors alone are grave hindrances to the formulation of any conception of progress. Reflection upon them might have saved men, Renouvier observes, from the presumptuous belief in assured progress. We cannot presume even to estimate the tendencies, the direction of its course, because of the enormous and ever-increasing complexity of free human activity. ”

“ The social unit is not the individual man or woman, it is the family. In that society which is not a mere association but a union, arising from common interests and sympathy, the individual realises himself as part of society. The highest ethical conception, however, arises when the individual, transcending himself and his family, feels and acts as a member of humanity itself, not only in his public, but also in his private life. In the idea of humanity Comte finds the concrete form of that universal which in the ethic of Kant was the symbol of duty itself. ”

“ He refuses to admit as true of the universal process in nature and in human history what is certainly true of human life—the fact that we create ends as we go on living. For Bergson there is no end in the universe, unless it be that of spontaneity of life such as Guyau had maintained. There is no guarantee of progress, no law of development, but endless possibility of progress. Such a view, as we have already insisted, is not pessimistic. It is, however, a warning to facile optimism to realise that humanity, being free, may go “dead wrong.” ”