The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Roberty - La Philosophie du siècle

by William Caldwell

La Philosophie du Siècle. Criticisme, Positivisme, Evolutionisme. Par E. de Roberty. Paris, Alcan, 1891. — pp. 234.

This volume forms the natural sequel to the author's volumes on Ancient and Modern Philosophy, and The Metaphysic and Psychology of the Unknowable. It is also intended to be introductory to two already partially accomplished works, one bearing on the metaphysic and psychology of the knowable, and the other on the monism which has been the chimerical pursuit of philosophers of all ages.

M. de Roberty thinks that the philosophy of the nineteenth century can be reduced to the three forms of Criticism, Positivism, and Evolutionism. He suggests that the origin of Criticism is to be found in Idealism, as critical philosophy arrives at idealities or abstractions such as the Infinite. The origin of Positivism is to be sought in Materialism as the dogmatic reaction against Idealism; and the origin of Evolutionism is to be sought in Sensationalism which, in the hands of physiologists and empiricists, led to excursions into biological science. As to this, one would wish that the author had done Criticism the justice of regarding it as predisposed against the excesses of all dogmatic philosophy, whether materialistic or idealistic. The modern upholders of the critical idea of philosophy, if they insist on anything, insist on the radical difference between the critical and historical method of philosophising. We shall see that it is just M. de Roberty's tendency to treat all philosophy as merely a historical phenomenon, which makes the reader feel that his book is illuminative and expository rather than convincing and judicial.

What M. de Roberty charges philosophers of our own and of all time with doing is the confusing of philosophy with special science. He certainly succeeds in showing that there has been very much of this, and also that the reigning conceptions of philosophy are influenced by this illusory idea. Science gradually absorbs ground from philosophy which too long and too often simply built illusory hypotheses on the unexplored regions of sense; physics and biology are both realms which science took from philosophy by offering an exact instead of a hypothetical treatment of them, and psychology too is now on the way to becoming an exact science. In the means, in short, that philosophy has used to attain the philosophical end — that of finality in our conceptions — it has been wrong; the methods leading to an analytic knowledge of nature do not necessarily lead to a synthetic knowledge. M. de Roberty of course does not imagine that philosophy can be independent of science; he holds, he says, to the idea of the general equivalence of science and philosophy, while disbelieving altogether in the equivalence of the philosophical and scientific constructions of the world as they have appeared in history. The true scientific philosophy has not yet arisen, because there are yet gaps in the whole of knowledge.

Are we then to hold that only a completed science can be a complete philosophy? We are apt to ask this in reading the book, for our author is always able to point out that such and such a state of science results in such and such a conception of the world; indeed, he calls this fact the supreme law of philosophical evolution. The strength of the book lies in its successful presentation of the evolution of nineteenth century philosophy in its relation to the history and problem of philosophy in general, and in the criticism it offers especially of Positivism and of Evolution. M. de Roberty's real idea of philosophy is that it ought to banish from its sphere all special problems, and that it ought to be the general systematization of the sciences or their co-ordination in view of a single end: a single integral conception of the world would be a final conception, and the conception of finality should lose its old teleological signification. We are still to-day in the theological phase of thinking, and cannot immediately hope to find the scientific philosophy; modern agnosticism is a sleeping stage of thought. Philosophy will be a systematic arrangement of the teaching of science without the use of hypotheses; induction in philosophy, indeed, will preclude the use of hypotheses. It is the philosophical development, though, that on the whole interests M. de Roberty rather than the idea of a scientific metaphysic. Instead, he tells us, of admitting the immediate action of the whole of positive science on the conceptions of the world, the majority of modern thinkers hold that one mere minimal part of our knowledge — the theory of cognition — suffices to explain the march of the philosophical development. This results from the notorious imperfection of social studies. Intellectual evolution can never really be considered apart from the conditions which constitute what we call a society. Society draws from its own bosom the persistent causes of its own development and change. The hierarchy of conceptions which is actually evolved consists in the four orders of knowledge: knowledge scientific, knowledge philosophic, knowledge æsthetic, and knowledge practical or technical — science, philosophy, art, industry; into these four phases of evolution does intellectual evolution resolve itself. In this connection M. de Roberty sharply criticises Comte's law of the three stages of thought. M. de Roberty's notion of the end of philosophy being the union of finality and causality, is eminently suggestive as a description of the ultimate coincidence of abstract reflection and of scientific investigation which human knowledge ought to aim at. One wishes, though, that he had helped the reader more by making use, say, of the distinction between the form and the content of philosophy or of a philosophy. As to content, a philosophy can never be more than a systematization of the knowledge of a given epoch, but formally regarded philosophy ought to be able to lay down not an absolute system, but the outlines of such a system. One feels somehow that the author has not defined sharply enough the standard by which all philosophical development can be estimated as a thing in itself, even although no one would wish to separate that development from the general development of man or society by which it is influenced and which it influences. The book is a valuable contribution to the study of the thought of our time and evinces a masterly grasp and knowledge of philosophical problems and philosophical history.

W. Calwell.