Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/123

 110 CRITICAL NOTICES I clearly in M. Eenouvier's view of Spinoza. An " inconse- quence " is detected in Spinoza's passage from his pantheistic metaphysics to an ethical doctrine of an elevated kind. The moral emotion that finds expression in the ethics, it is implied, ought not to have been excluded from the determination of the metaphysical doctrine ; since it has been excluded, however, its coming in afterwards is unjustifiable. But, according to M. Renouvier's view, Spinoza's theoretical doctrine must have been in part emotionally and actively determined; for no doctrine escapes this necessity. If it was not determined by an ethical emotion, by what kind of emotion, then, was it determined? Clearly an incomplete enumeration has been made of the elements of Spinoza's philosophy. Account has been taken of the high moral emotion as well as of the passionless analysis ; what has been omitted is the " amor intellectualis," the desire for perfect completeness of explanation by purely theoretical and " imma- nent " principles. But is not this the properly philosophical emotion ? And does not its dominance in what M. Eenouvier calls the " intellectualist " systems furnish a presumption that these, and not the "practical" systems, have given the right answers to the perennial questions of philosophy '? The emotion directed to practice has its scope in the discrimination of right and wrong actions or dispositions. The philosophical emotion is an impulse towards what M. Renouvier himself calls " the ideal of science ". Can any reason be given why, when we are approaching this ideal, we should be turned back from it by views of practical utility? It is not as if there were no positive im- pulse conflicting with affirmations made in the name of the prac- tical reason. If this were so, we should have remained for ever absolutely under the dominion of practical considerations ; the idea of a disinterested view of the universe would never have occurred to us. But, when this idea has once presented itself, has not " the practical reason " the appearance of being in intel- lectual things something of an interloper ? Of course philosophy, if it is to be worthy of the name, must somewhere make a return on practice, so as not to abandon life to the guidance of custom and unreasoned opinion. But M. Renouvier shows that it was exactly in antiquity, when the primacy of the theoretical reason was unquestioned, that philo- sophy applied itself most to practice and had most practical influence. After remarking on the comparative weakness of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, on the practical side the Ethics of Spinoza being mentioned as an exception (ii. 123-4) he explains the " intellectualism " (in this sense) of modern philosophy by the circumstance that the practical field was preoccupied, and that for a long time philosophers were warned off from it. The doctrine of " the practical reason," how- ever, seems to be anything rather than the correction of this kind of intellectualism in modern philosophy. If philosophy, instead