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

IN FRANCE,
the will. Bossuet classes it with the intellectual operations.
"I wish nothing," said he, "save for some reason." If then
you cut off reason, what have you? A blind power which is no
more will, than its opposite. One may call it so, if he pleases,
for names are free; but one can just as well call it force, instinct, necessity; it is a nondescript, which resembles the
human will, to quote Spinoza, "as much as the dog (Canis), in
the constellations, resembles the dog, the animal that barks."
Proof of the indeterminate nature of this principle of absolute
will is found in the utterly opposite consequences which can be
derived from it. MI. Seerttan, for example, comprising in his
philosophy the religious tendencies of his own nature, arrives at
a Christian optimism, which, while giving the largest place to
evil, finds in redemption the final triumph of the good. On the
other hand, the philosopher of Frankfort (Schopenhauer)
nourished in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, ends
in pessimism, and while equally positing the principle of absolute liberty, he thinks that that blind and indifferent principle
can produce "only the worst of possible worlds." In one word,
either we deprive absolute liberty of every attribute, and the
residue is a blind force, independent alike to good or to evil; or,
under the name of will, you mean an active, living and wise
power; and we have got back to the threefold division of the
common system of philosophy, and it is simply a delusion to
believe that one has discovered a new principle.
M. Fouill1e seems to us to oscillate perpetually between these
two philosophies. On the one hand he says; "Liberty is the
Absolute;" it is "the supreme independence;" it is again, that
from which everything depends and which depends upon nothing. Yet how can such an absolute, which determines everything without itself being determined, "which is what it is because it is it," be distinguished from the ancient,/tumn; which
the author combats, with Leibnitz at the opening of his book,
but the notion of which he says, blends with that of absolute
liberty? ()n the other hand, he says that that absolute ought
to be represented "under the active form of the spirit, as a
living personal being which determines itself by thought, by
desire, and by action, and which is entirely in the action."
Thus the absolute liberty, being at once thought, desire, and
action, is indistinguishable from the three general faculties of
1874.]
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