In contrast to the attitude of Ravaisson and Lachelier Fouillée inclines in some respects to the attitude of Taine and many passages of his book show him to be holding at least a temporary brief for the partisans of determinism. He agrees notably with Taine in his objecting to the contention that under the determinist theory moral values lose their significance. Fouillée claims that it is both incorrect and unfair to argue that “under the necessity-hypothesis a thing being all that it can be is thereby all that it should be.”[14].
[14] _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, p. 51 (fourth edition).
He goes on to point out that the consciousness of independence, which is an essential of freedom, may be nothing more than a lack of consciousness of our dependence. Motives he is inclined to speak of as determining the will itself, while he looks upon the “liberty of indifference” or of hazard as merely a concession to the operations of mechanical necessity. The “liberty of indifference” is often the mere play of instinct and of fatality, while hazard, so far from being an argument in the hands of the upholders of freedom, is really a determination made previously by something other than one’s own will.
This is a direct attack upon the doctrines put forward by both Cournot and Renouvier. Fouillée is well aware of this, and twenty pages of his thesis are devoted to a critical and hostile examination of the statements of both Renouvier and his friend Lequier.[15] Fouillée claims that these two thinkers have only disguised and misplaced the “liberty of indifference”; they have not, he thinks, really suppressed it, although both of them profess to reject it absolutely. A keen discussion between Fouillée and Renouvier arose from this and continued for some time, being marked on both sides by powerful dialectic. Renouvier used his paper the _Critique philosophique_ as his medium, while Fouillée continued in subsequent editions of his thesis, in his _Idée moderne du Droit_ and also in his acute study _Critique des Systèmes de Morale contemporains_. Fouillée took Renouvier to task particularly for his maintaining that if all be determined then truth and error are indistinguishable. Fouillée claims that the distinction between truth and error is by no means parallel to that between necessity and freedom. An error may, he points out, be necessitated, and consequently we must look elsewhere for our doctrine of certitude than to the affirmation of freedom. In the philosophy of Renouvier, as we have seen, these two are intimately connected. Fouillée criticises the neo-critical doctrine of freedom on the ground that Renouvier mars his thought by a tendency to look upon the determinist as a passive and inert creature. This, he says, is “the argument of laziness” applied to the intelligence. “One forgets,” says Fouillée, “that if intelligence is a mirror, it is not an immovable and powerless mirror: it is a mirror always turning itself to reality.”[16]