The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Pillon - L'Année philosophique

by William James (1842-1910)

L’Année Philosophique. Publiée sous la Direction de F. Pillon. 2me Année, 1891. Paris, Felix Alcan, 1892. — 8vo., pp. 352.

M. Pillon resumed last year the publication which in 1872 was merged in that larger enterprise the weekly, and later the monthly, Critique Philosophique, which M. Renouvier and he carried on with such signal ability and energy for eighteen years. The plan of the Année Philosophique is to publish a small number of original articles, each making some fundamental application of the principles of the "criticist" school, and to follow them by short notices of all the important works on philosophy published in France during the previous year. The works thus noticed by M. Pillon are seventy-one in number, classified under four heads, viz. Metaphysic, Psychology, and Philosophy of the Sciences; Moral and Religious Philosophy; Philosophy of History, Sociology, and Pedagogy; and History of Philosophy. These notices average a page and a third in length, are readable, since most of them combine critical appreciation (or depreciation) with their reporting function, and, taken together, give a fairly adequate picture of the intellectual movement of the year in France, so far as it deals with the more universal questions. Works of minute detail in psychology, e.g. fall outside of M. Pillon's scope. It is hardly necessary to say that the attitude consistently held by M. Pillon in his critical strictures on the various works is the pluralistic and phenomenistic one of M. Renouvier.

The articles de fond of the volume are three in number. I subjoin a word about each.

In sixty-six pages, entitled La Philosophie de la Règle et du Compas, the veteran Renouvier rallies once more to the defence of the ultimate character, for us, of the principles of the ordinary geometry, and combats the "transcendental" speculations of certain geometers of the day. The article has the solid texture of all this author's writings. He discusses in detail Euclid's axioms and postulates, applying to them the distinction of analytic and synthetic judgments, and proposing to distinguish hereafter as postulates only such propositions as unite two distinct conceptions, and may consequently be denied without contradiction in terms. That two straight lines cannot enclose a space is no such postulate, for it follows analytically from the notion of straight line. But M. Renouvier finds involved in Euclid's geometry four genuine postulates, which combine a notion of shape with one of quantity. These postulates are: 1st, that the straight line is the distance between its termini; 2d, that, of lines having the same termini, those which envelop the others are the longer; 3d, that the perpendicular divides the space on either side of it into angles of equal content, and that a line making a complete revolution about a point describes four such angles; and 4th, that a point following the contour of a closed polygon and turning around each of its angles has, when it returns to its original direction, rotated through a sum of angles equal to four right angles. From this last postulate (which M. R. apparently adopts from M. A. J. H. Vincent) it follows almost immediately that the angles internal of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and from this theorem Euclid's postulate about parallels can be immediately deduced. The postulate of the parallels is thus neither more nor less demonstrable — or indemonstrable — than other propositions, and geometers have been wrong in treating it as an anomaly or scandal in their science.

Lobatschewsky's ignoring of it, and his assumption of triangles with their angles equal to less than two right angles, are constantly defended by saying that, since the consequences deduced lead to no conflict with the other postulates and axioms of Euclid, there may well be "something in" this imaginary geometry. M. Renouvier disposes of this talk very clearly. How could Lobatschewsky's assumption, however absurd in itself, when combined with Euclid's residual principles, lead to consequences which contradict the latter? This could only happen if the assumption itself contradicted the latter. But it only contradicts the postulate of parallels; and that, by universal consent, is a principle independent of all others. The "consequences," in the imaginary geometry, must then be internally consistent with each other, with the true premises, and with the absurdly assumed one, from which they are deduced; but they may be absurd nevertheless, absurd a priori, as one of their premises is absurd, and absurd a posteriori or in relation to the facts. Nothing in fact is more absurd than to treat this geometry as peculiarly empirical. Lack of space forbids an analysis of the rest of the paper, in which M. Renouvier discusses in a very luminous way the theory of measure and incommensurability, and the method of limits, and criticises the soi-disant empirical character of Riemann's and Helmholtz's n-dimensional speculations. The article may be cordially recommended to all who are interested in the philosophy of mathematics.

The second article, by M. Pillon, is on the Historical Evolution of Atomism, first as a cosmological, and second as a metaphysical, hypothesis. After Lasswitz'a great history, so recently completed, any shorter sketch must needs seem inadequate; and when we say that M. Pillon has avoided technicalities and that his point of view is less that of the physicist than that of the philosopher, we have sufficiently indicated both its shortcomings and its merits. This writer has a remarkably clear style, and a peculiar talent for weaving quotations from the original historic sources into the tissue of his own exposition without interrupting the continuity of the latter. He shows us how atomism, which began by being an atheistic speculation, became, as it triumphed in Newton's hands, both scientific and theistic. He shows how the explanation of such properties of matter as hardness and figure by the attraction of atoms led naturally to the evaporation of the supposed original figure and hardness of the atom itself, so that by Boscovich these attributes were conceived as due to repulsive forces emanating from unextended points of space. Boscovich first used the argument of the impossibility of an actualized infinite to prove the discreteness and finite number of his force-atoms. These, however, remained a purely physical conception. It was Maupertuis who, basing himself on Locke's argument that we might conceive the Almighty to have made matter think, added desire, memory, and habit to the atoms, and laid the foundations of the hylozoism of the present day. Crystals and organisms are best explained by the habits of union of the several atoms inter se; variations of organic species by lapses in the atoms, memory and new habits consequent thereon; and finally the elementary intelligences of the atoms integrate (just as with Spencer and Taine) into the consciousness of the entire organism. But the real elaborator of hylozoism as a philosophy distinctly opposed to theism and spiritualism is, according to M. Pillon, Charles Lemaire, whose two volumes, Initiation à la philosophie, à la liberté, published in 1842-43, are, it is safe to say, quite unknown to any reader of these lines. By the number of the atoms, by their activity and their instinct, all the phenomena of the world can be explained, according to Lemaire, of whose work Pillon gives a very interesting account. The conclusion of the article is that, since along one line of thought the atoms have "evolved" into the unextended and dynamic centres of Boscovich, and along another line into the extended but perceptive and instinctive entities of Maupertuis and others, spiritualizing themselves, so to speak, negatively by losing extent, positively by adding mental life, the natural conclusion is that Atomism necessarily resolves itself into Monadism if clearly thought out. The ultimately real entities can only be spiritual forces which exist for themselves consciously and for each other under spatial form. In establishing this position, M. Pillon criticises Leibnitz for blowing hot and cold in the matter of the realized infinite, and ends with some strictures on M. Evellin’s recent work, Infini et Quantité. The essay is full of charmingly presented erudition, and as a short vue d'ensemble for students' use it cannot be surpassed.

The third essay of the volume, by Professor L. Dauriac, is entitled Du Positivisme en Psychologie, à propos des Principes de Psychologie de M. W. James. M. Dauriac has the temperament of genius, but his style lacks the clearness of that of Pillon and the weight of that of Renouvier. He is often more ingenious than direct, and sometimes hard to track to a categorical conclusion. He confines himself in this discussion to pointing out the vacillating character of his author's cerebralistic attitude in psychology, after speaking in very indulgent terms of the general qualities of his book. In the latter it is contended that "Psychology" should become "positivistic" and a "natural science." If, says M. Dauriac, by this a science be meant which shall aim to deal with facts that can be physically (in this case cerebrally) explained, the inevitable result is the omission of a great deal of that purely descriptive account of mental phenomena which the older psychology succeeded in giving us so well. In J.'s book, accordingly, we get no mention of the higher processes of Imagination, a very inadequate chapter on Emotion, and nothing on Æsthetic and Moral sensibility. M. Dauriac then shows how "the study of mental life and its conditions" usually results in making so much of the physical antecedents as to leave but little room for consideration of the mental life itself. "The human automaton is at the end of physiological psychology, and consciousness is bound to become a superfluity there ... a sort, horresco referens, of excrement of the brain." But the author, by admitting feeling to be a teleologic force, is unfaithful to his professed "positivism"; and the moment one admits that consciousness may have a use, the postulate of continuity would lead one to suppose that reflex action not only may be explained by the evolution of the organism under the guidance of the feelings of past generations, but may even now be accompanied by a consciousness which has become relatively inert. More consistent positivists will therefore look coldly upon Mr. James's work. As for M. Dauriac himself, he applauds him for his inconsistency, believing that the "metaphysical" view is the eternal one, that the physical world is a phenomenon; that consciousness, psychologically considered, is a cause of movement; and that if it ever ceases to be so, that will be because it has freely abdicated its task.

W. J.