Recent Spiritualist Philosophy in France [pp. 679-697]

RECENT SPIRITUALIST PHILOSOPHY
Such an hypothesis appears monstrous to us, and we think there
will always remain a certain harmony, at all events, among the
elements of the universe; but whence should we know it, if we
did not recognize that that harmony is as it were the highest
interest of nature, and that the causes whence it seems to result,
necessarily, are nothing but the means wisely arranget to estab lish it." The law of final causes is hence as needful to the under standing of nature, as that of efficient causes.
What is the ground of that second law? As before, the author
here makes use of the necessity of unity in thought: but this is
unity of another sort. The first is a superficial and external
unity. What in fact is motion? It is nothing more than the
possibility of passing without interruption from place to place
in space and time. That is an empty unity, devoid of intrinsic
reality. (A thought which rests wholly upon the mechanical
unity of nature, slips along the surface of things without reaching the things themselves. Not attaining reality, it lacks reality
in itself and is but the empty form of a thought.) We must
therefore find a means of rendering the thought real, and the
reality intelligible, which will be by substituting for the purely
external unity of the universal mechanism, the internal and organic unity of a systematic harmony. Without that principle
thought could still exist, "but that purely abstract existence
would be a condition of evanescence and of death." The law
of final causes gives life to thought while giving it to nature.
Once in possession of this principle, our idealist philosophy
seeks to restore, in succession, all the truths which it had abstracted in itsearlier stages. It is thus that it grasps, or believes
that it grasps again, the objectivity of nature, the principle of
force, of activity, of spontaneity, of liberty; that it raises itself
to the human soul, the spirituality of which it maintains, at its
point of view. In a word, if the principle of efficient cause
conducts to a sort of idealistic materialism, the principal of final
causes brings us to " spiritual realism."
Nor is this the last word of philosophy; it is only its second
stage, which still summons us to to a third; "this second philosophy, says the author in concluding, in subordinating mechanism to final cause, prepares us to subordinate final cause to a
higher principle, and to overpass by an act of faith the limits of
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IOct.