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 294 (Ch. Renouvier: Les derniers entretiens. Recueillis par L. Prat).

The philosophy of Emile Boutroux (born 1845, erstwhile professor at the Sorbonne, now directeur de la fondation Thiers) belongs to a tendency originating from Maine de Biran. In his criticism of the principle of causality he approaches Renouvier; but it is not so much the theory of continuity that he opposes, as the attempts to conceive everything as identical or homogeneous and to reduce the individual to the universal (De la contingence des lois de la nature, 1875; De l'idée de la loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contemporaine, 1895). Like Comte he insists that every new field of experience requires new principles which cannot be deduced from the principles which apply to other fields. The more concrete principles cannot be reduced to abstract principles. The more we enter into the concrete, so much the more does the dynamic gain transcendence over the mechanical, the qualitative over the quantitative. It is possible furthermore for new beginnings to take place in nature which cannot be derived from their antecedents. As a matter of fact the whole uniform system of nature revealed to us by science is nothing more than the river bed which is formed by an inherent spontaneous evolution, and which may be changed by variations of this evolution. The spontaneous variations (les variations contingents) bear witness to the freedom which constitutes the inner nature of things.—Epistemologically considered the so-called laws of nature are nothing more than a summary of the methods applied in the effort to understand things (assimiler les choses à notre intelligence).

Henri Bergson (born 1859), professor at the College de France) carries forward the movement begun by