Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/227

No. 2.] read any article signed by him of which the heading wore a tempting sound. Once caught in the firm-knit texture of his philosophic web, as these writings display it, it would be strange if any one with capacity to enjoy strong thinking could help going on to master the Essais de Critique Générale.

As Bonaparte said that the Europe of the future would have to be either Republican or Cossack, so, to put the matter ultra-simply, the present reviewer feels like saying that the philosophy of the future will have to be that either of Renouvier or of Hegel. They represent the radical extremes, and what lies between need hardly count. Either hold fast, with Renouvier, to the principles of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle absolutely, and then regard the world as a bundle, an irreducible pluralism of data related by definite laws, or insist with Hegel that a more inward unity than that of mere 'law' weaves all this manifold together, throw over the logical principles aforesaid, frankly grant the world to be a mystery, and deny of every datum that it is in truth the individual existent which it seems. Clearness and consistency, with irremediable discontinuity and pluralism, or, on the other hand, unity without clearness or 'consistency,' and with the need of some more living sort of insight than that furnished by the logical understanding – such is the dilemma which it is Renouvier's great merit to have made sharper and more explicit than it ever was made before. He sides with the understanding so uncompromisingly that all monists should regard his system as the most precious possible object against which to develop their reaction.

Renouvier's great principle is, that amongst the difficulties which philosophy presents, a datum or principle which is merely inexplicable must always be preferred to one which is inwardly self-contradictory. The worst examples of self-contradiction which philosophy offers are those things infinite in nature, which yet are supposed to be completely given. Such are an infinite past time, an infinitely extended or a finitely extended but continuous matter, an infinite causal regress, or an infinitely omniscient God. Instead of such actualized infinites, Renouvier postulates blank, unexplained beginnings or endings as lesser stumbling blocks, and supposes thus a Universe finite in extension, division and history, and cared for by a finite personal God. He accepts the Humian criticisms; moreover, he regards the minimum of verifiable being as the phenomenon with its double subject-object quality, and denies both material and spiritual substances and transitive force or cause. Yet with all this Roman