Note 44 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

The outstanding representative in France during the entire second half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or “Neo-Kantianism,” a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose influence, for example, James attributed a part of his mental development. His review, the Critique Philosophique, was a worthy (idealist) rival of the more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, review of Ribot, the Revue Philosophique. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as Renouvier does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system, is not in general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific” philosophy of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic rearrangements of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-philosophy must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work of others) to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too in the newer philosophy of “Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book upon this very subject (Le Personnalisme, 1902). In this work, we find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of “rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable or a priori “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation of existence, and “personality” the first “causal principle” of the world (although admitting “creation” to be beyond our comprehension). He examines critically, too, the notions of the “Absolute” and of the “Unconditioned,” holding that they should not be substantiated into entities. “Belief” is involved in “every act,” he teaches—also another pragmatist doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche, and like our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work, is further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on The New Monadology (La Nouvelle Monadologie). This is one of the most complete presentations of a philosophy of “Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”—to be associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr. James Ward upon the Realm of Ends, referred to on p. 162.