622 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



surface." ^ Moreover, Lachelier endeavours to show how 

 the mechanical connections are bound up with the 

 essence of human thinking and are as such purely 

 formal, whereas the actual content of this form is given 

 to us not through thought but through sensation or 

 sight. " Thought which would rest exclusively on the 

 mechanical unity in nature lies, as it were, on the sur- 

 face of things without penetrating into the things 

 themselves : divorced from reality it would be itself 

 deficient in reality, and would be no more than the 

 empty form or abstract possibility of thought. We 

 must therefore find the means at once of making 

 thought real and reality intelligible ; and this can only 

 be done through a second unity w'hich stands in the 

 same relation to the matter of phenomena as the first 

 stands to their form." ^ 



Whilst Lachelier thus dwells upon the contingent in 

 Nature, a subject which has received further treatment in 

 the writings of Emile Boutroux,^ Charles Eenouvier was 

 led away from the positivist creed which he originally 

 embraced by a different line of argument. He recog- 

 nised the insufficiency of positivism by realising that 

 contradictions and discontinuities meet us everywhere 

 in our contemplation of the world of nature as well as 

 the facts of history. He thus abandoned his original 

 endeavour to bring unity and order into his philoso- 

 phical views by reducing qualitative to quantitative 

 differences and by finding imperceptible transitions be- 



^ ' Du Fondement de I'lnduc- I ^ ' De la Contingence des Lois de 

 tion.' p. 73. la Nature' (3rd ed., 1898). 



2 ibid., p. 77. I 



