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Whether space, as Leibnitz maintains, be an order of coexistence and time an order of sequences, whether it be by space that we succeed in representing time or whether time be an essential form of any representation, whether time be the father of space or space the father of time, one thing is certain, which is that the efforts of the Kantian or neo-Kantian apriorists and of the pure empiricists and the idealistic empiricists all end in the same darkness; that all the philosophers who have grappled with the formidable dual problem, among whom one may mention indiscriminately the names of the greatest thinkers of yesterday and to-day Herbert Spencer, Helmholtz, Renouvier, James Sully, Stumpf, James Ward, William James, Stuart Mill, Ribot, Fouillee, Guyau, Bain, Lechalas, Balmes, Dunan and endless others have been unable to tame it; and that, however much their theories may contradict one another, they are all equally defensible and alike struggle vainly in the darkness against shadows that are not of our world.
What characterises materialist philosophy is its belief in the possibility of such a passage, and its considering it as the genesis of thought. "One calls materialist," says Renouvier, with great exactness, "every philosophy which defines thought as the product of a compound whose elements do not imply thought."
As I look back into the sixties, Mill, Bain, and Hamilton were the only official philosophers in Britain. Spencer, Martineau, and Hodgson were just beginning. In France, the pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and Renouvier alone had an original system.
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.
Let us begin with this last opinion. It consists in supposing that the relations are given to things by the mind itself. These relations have been termed categories. The question of categories plays an important part in the history of philosophy. Three great philosophers, Aristotle, Kant, and Renouvier have drawn up a list, or, as it is called, a table of them, and this table is very long.
Now this feeling at the same time maintains us in a humility highly favourable to the health of the soul and also in a serene confidence in the mysterious being who presides over universal evolution and who, no doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul of it. The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin. The Positivist School: Auguste Comte. The Kantist School: Renouvier.
The candidate who is conscious of merit, very often knowing very well what less meritorious competitors are about, and not wishing to be beaten, also professes the same useful opinions. There we have that "infection of evil," which M. Renouvier has explained so admirably in his Science de la Morale.
For further details on this point, consult Mabilleau, Victor Hugo, 2nd part, chaps. II, III, IV. Renouvier, in the book devoted to the poet, asserts that "on account of his aptitude for representing to himself the details of a figure, order and position in space, beyond any present sensation," Victor Hugo could have become a mathematician of the highest order.
This is one of the corner-stones of the neo-criticism of RENOUVIER. He asserts that all representation is double-faced, and that what is known to us presents itself in the character of both representative and represented. It has often been said that the rôle of intelligence consists in uniting or grasping the relations of things.
John Stuart Mill has no hesitation in affirming that: "The mind, in perceiving external objects, can only take notice of its own conditions." And Renouvier expresses the same arbitrary assertion with greater obscurity when he writes: "The monad is constituted by this relation: the connection of the subject with the object within the subject."
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