Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/114

 C. RENOUVIER, DES DOCTRINES PHILOSOPHIQUES. 101 time he was under the fascination of this idea, and himself tried to construct a philosophy that should reconcile all doctrines by combining their contradictory positions. With this view he was never able quite to satisfy himself ; and at last he decisively re- jected it. The result of this decision was the conviction that from the beginning of philosophic thought truth has been on one side of each of the great philosophic controversies and error on the other, and that the chief philosophical directions remain always the same. There has been progress in accuracy of view of details, in understanding of opposing positions, and in the statement of these positions and their logical grouping ; but none of the chief directions has ever succeeded, during a period of philosophical freedom, in excluding the others ; and since differ- ences of personality become accentuated instead of disappearing, it is not likely that by free consent at least any of them will ever finally gain the mastery. For it is personality that determines the character of every philosopher's view of the world as a whole. Each view, the true view as much as the false, is a belief, determined partly by the "passive factors'' of circumstances and temperament, but ultimately by an act of choice. The great opposing systems which combine in logical order the theses and antitheses of the historical antinomies, and are now in process of being definitely formed, are, on the one side, a Pantheism based on the larger hypotheses of science carried beyond scientific limits, and laying claim to the certainty of "evidence "; on the other side a Theism based on Kant's postulates of the practical reason, and pro- fessing "belief" not "evidence" as its ultimate ground of certainty. To the latter system the author proclaims his own adhesion. By thus making plain to the reader which side he takes, M. Eanouvier has hoped to gain in impartiality, and he has suc- ceeded. A writer who is attracted by strong and decided affirma- tions and negations, and who sees in the history of philosophy the tendency of systems to become more individualised rather than the tendency to compromise and conciliation, is, besides, under no temptation to tone down his opponents' views, and can do justice to them without finding in them resemblances to his own. M. Eenouvier's treatment of views opposed to his own is frequently even more than impartial. The intellectual sympathy which he displays with the pantheistic ideas of the early philo- sophers of Greece does not disappear when he comes to deal with modern philosophers ; but what has struck him especially is the far-reaching character of the ideas thrown out at the opening of each period of speculation, and in times of revolutionary change. We are wrong, he remarks, in thinking the height of abstraction reserved for an advanced and complex state of intel- lectual culture. Except in morals, the true initiators, and often the most profound, in that their views were more exclusive and more absolute, were the philosophers of the first period of Greek