PHILOSOPHY 261 



into a shallow Eclecticism, altogether too subservient 

 to conservative political ends and the requirements of 

 a school philosophy. RAVAISSON, on the contrary, in 

 "De 1'habitude" and " Rapport sur la philosophic en 

 France au xixe siecle," making full use of de Biran's 

 method and ideas, but also drawing on Aristotle, Leibnitz, 

 and Schelling, arrived at a comprehensive realistic spirit- 

 ualism in which nature appears as a refraction or diminu- 

 tion of mind (' 'esprit' ') . Falling under the spell of Ravaisson 

 but also profoundly influenced by Kant, whose thought he 

 introduced into academic circles in France, LACHELIER, 

 in "Du fondement de Finduction," "Etude sur le syl- 

 logisme," and " Psychologic et metaphysique," has 

 demonstrated the necessity of subordinating ultimately 

 physical causation and mechanism to final causation and 

 teleology. Influenced alike by Ravaisson's doctrine of 

 habit as the analogy most illuminating in interpreting 

 the relation between the material and spiritual aspects 

 of our experience and by Lachelier's criticism of the 

 causal concept, BOUTROUX, in "De la contingence des 

 lois de la nature, " and " De 1'idee de loi naturelle," sketches 

 an evolutionary conception of the world in which laws, 

 conceived on the analogy of habits, are contingent and 

 ever in course of development. 



In this same general current of tradition stands BERG- 

 SON. In a brilliant series of monographs, ' ' Essai sur les don- 

 nees immediates de la conscience," "Matiere et memoire," 

 and "L'E volution creatrice," he has attempted, on the 

 one hand, to show the fallacy involved in the method of 

 intellectual analysis and the inadequacy of the rational, 

 mechanical interpretation of the world in which it in- 

 evitably issues; on the other hand, he has endeavored to 

 display the fruitfulness of intuition as the method which 

 can reveal the immediately given data which make up 

 our concrete experience. On the basis of these data the 



