Lachelier’s treatment of freedom is an important landmark in the spiritualist development. By his concentrated analysis of the problem of induction he brought out the significance of efficient and final causes respectively. He appears as the pupil of Ravaisson, whose initial inspiration is apparent in his whole work, especially in his treatment of freedom. He dwells upon the fact of the spontaneity of the spirit—a point of view which Ravaisson succeeded in imparting to the three thinkers, Lachelier, Boutroux and Bergson. Besides the influence of Ravaisson, however, that of Kant and Leibnitz appears in Lachelier’s attitude to freedom. Yet he passes beyond the Kantian position, and he rejects the double-aspect doctrine which Leibnitz maintained with regard to efficient and final causes. Lachelier insists that the spontaneity of spirit stands above and underlies the whole of nature. This is the point which Boutroux, under Lachelier’s influence, took up in his _Contingence des Lois de la Nature_. Lachelier, in attacking the purely mechanistic conception of the universe, endeavoured, as he himself put it, “to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death and freedom for fatalism.” Rather than universal necessity it is universal contingence which is the real definition of existence. We are free to determine ourselves in accordance with ends we set before us, and to act in the manner necessary to accomplish those ends. Our life itself, as he shows in the conclusion of his brilliant little article _Psychologie et Métaphysique_, is creative, and we must beware of arguing that what we have been makes us what we are, for that character which we look upon as determining us need not do so if we free ourselves from habit, and, further, this character is, in any case, itself the result of our free actions over extended time, the free creation of our own personality.
While with Ravaisson and Lachelier the concept of freedom was being rather fully developed in opposition to the determinist doctrines, Fouillée, in his brilliant and acute thesis on _Liberté et Déterminisme_, endeavoured to call a halt to this supremacy of Freedom, and to be true to the principles of reconciliation which he laid down for himself in his philosophy. He confesses himself, at the outset, to be a pacifist rather than a belligerent in this classic dispute between determinists on the one hand and partisans of freedom on the other. He believes that, on intimate investigation pursued sufficiently far, the two opposing doctrines will be seen to converge. Such a declaration would seem to be dangerously superficial in a warfare as bitter and as sharp as this. It must be admitted that, as is the case with many who profess to conciliate two conflicting views, Fouillée leaves us at times without precise and definite indication of his own position.