Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!)
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CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I - FROM ECLECTICISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIBERTY
§ 1. The Collapse Of Eclecticism.
§ 2. Positivism.
§ 3. The New Spiritualism.
§ 4. The New Tendencies.
CHAPTER II - PHENOMENALISM
§ 1. Renouvier.
§ 2. Gourd And Boirac.
CHAPTER III - FROM KANT TO ABSOLUTE POSITIVISM
§ 1. Lachelier.
§ 2. The Kantians.
§ 3. Weber And Absolute Positivism.
CHAPTER IV - SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS
§ 1. The Philosophy Of Contingency.
§ 2. The Criticism Of Science.
§ 3. The Philosophy Of Intuition: Bergson.
§4. The Bergsonian School.
CHAPTER V - POSITIVISM AND PLATONISM
§ 1. The Social Sciences.
§ 2. History.
§ 3. Positivism And Platonism.
§ 4. The Ethics Of Platonism.
CHAPTER VI - THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION AND MODERNISM
§ 1. The Philosophy Of Belief.
§ 2. The Philosophy Of Action: Blondel.
§ 3. Modernism.
§ 4. Sorel's Syndicalism.
§ 5. Summary.
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An excerpt from the beginning of:
CHAPTER I - FROM ECLECTICISM TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIBERTY
§ 1. The Collapse Of Eclecticism.
The impression left by French philosophy is one of a much greater richness and variety as compared with German. Although it only now and then, in some culminating point, actually attains a higher level, yet where it develops the same favourite theme—the immediate life of the spirit—it carries into its inquiry a much greater vitality and exuberance, and so lively a sense of concrete reality that the life of the senses is transfigured and becomes the symbol of a more profound truth. It is this sense of concreteness that is characteristic of French philosophy. It views immediate life not as something entirely on the surface as the German and English empiricists do, but as a symbol of what lies beneath.
French philosophy is a young philosophy. While German thought has a glorious past in comparison with which the present appears decadent, French philosophy is just rising; its sense of the concrete is not a heritage, but an attainment, a reaction against an empty past.
If one recalls the condition of philosophy in France about 1840, one can hardly believe it possible that so many changes should have taken place in so short a time. At that period eclecticism held a monopoly of academic thought and reigned unopposed. Eclecticism was not a philosophy but a creed. Out of a few reminiscences of German idealism and numerous extracts from the Scottish psychologists, its high-priest, Cousin, had built up a system whose cardinal points were psychology and metaphysics. His philosophical formula is first, by means of accurate introspection, to extract from our own minds a number of fundamental general ideas, and then to elaborate them into a metaphysical theory. But we must ban Kant, because he is a sceptic; and we must eschew the theological errors of Schelling and Hegel (Cousin had himself given way to them earlier in his career), and above all we must observe religious and philosophical orthodoxy. For more than half a century this programme paralysed thought: with the result that creative thinkers, like Vacherot and Renouvier, were impelled to react against eclecticism, as though to shake off this insidious paralysis.
But Cousin's school proved itself incapable of carrying out the whole of the master's programme: it perceived that the way of metaphysics was somewhat slippery, and so, following the example of Jouffroy, it confined itself to psychology. Hence the appearance of numerous theories of the faculties of the mind, of which that of Gamier, which has achieved celebrity as a model of inconclusiveness, is typical.
