Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/230

216 Our author then treats successively of various physical, chemical, and biological conceptions of a general sort. It is obvious that not much can be done here from the a priori point of view, and that his opinions can be but tentative and suggestive. This is one reason why I called the present work a poor one with which to begin the study of its author. He believes in kinetic theories, and in general in the tendency to convert physics into mechanics. All the orders of 'force' he would reduce to accelerations varying with distance, and would prefer to see common matter rather than ether treated as the vehicle of radiant energy, if a theory could be defined. In biology he insists that, since in the formation of living things the physical and chemical laws seem to work as if under plastic guidance, we ought frankly to admit the fact. This seems to imply that when 'monads' of a superior order appear, the phenomena which ensue need new 'laws' to express them. Living matter, as we call it, must be the space-correlative of a form of psychic existence superior to that of which dead matter is the sensible cloak. The connexion of our own 'soul' with the body, in the synthesis known as a 'person,' involves new modes of conduct in the bodily materials themselves, which, out of that connexion, would not be found moving as they now do in the service of our mentally determined ends. "Our imaginations, our passions never occur without all our acts, from degree to degree, from the highest organs to the lowest atoms, being modified according to law. Each of these acts, while existing inwardly for itself, is a force in relation to the other correlative acts. ... The effect of these forces is a phenomenon of harmony, beyond which we cannot penetrate and which is one with existence itself, for there is no existence but by relations and communications." The details M. Renouvier leaves perforce indeterminate; and because they express no very trenchant doctrine, I say little of the pages in which he treats both of planetary and of organic evolution. They were written twenty-five years ago, and are now brought down to date by critical additions, a form which is always disadvantageous, and especially so when the subject has made such an extraordinary progress between the two dates. It should be said, however, that Renouvier, even twenty-five years ago, was far more hospitable to 'Darwinism' than most Frenchmen. His only reserves bore on the attempts to treat evolution as a monistic philosophy of nature through the conception of continuity of change, which of course he rejects. The higher qualities of being, when they come, simply come; the inferior can in no intelligible sense produce the