His intense humanism prompted him to remarks in praise of freedom, and he seems to have recognised in man a certain power of freedom; but in view of his belief in universal cause he is careful to qualify this. Further, his intensely religious mind remained in love with the doctrine of divine guidance which is characteristic of Christian and most religious thought. Although Renan left the Church, this belief never left Renan. He sees God working out an eternal purpose in history, and this he never reconciled with the problem of man’s free will. The humanist in him could remark that the one object of life is the development of the mind, and the first condition for this is freedom. Here he appears to have in view freedom from political and religious restrictions. He is thinking of the educational problem. His own attitude to the ultimate question of freedom in itself, as opposed to determinism, is best expressed in his _Examen d’une Conscience philosophique_. He there shows that the universe is the result of a lengthy development, the. beginnings of which we do not know. “In the innumerable links of that chain,” says Renan, “we find not one free act before the appearance of man, or, if you like, living beings.” With man, however, freedom comes into the scheme of things. A free cause is seen employing the forces of nature for willed ends. Yet this is but nature itself blossoming to self-consciousness; this free cause emanates from nature itself. There is no rude break between man with his free power and unconscious nature. Both are interconnected. Freedom is indeed the appearance of something “new,” but it is not, insists Renan, something divorced from what has gone before.
We see in Renan a rejection of the severely deterministic doctrine of Taine, but it is by no means a complete rejection or refutation of it. Renan adheres largely to the scientific and positivist attitude which is such a feature of Taine’s work. His humanism, however, recognises the inadequacy of such doctrines and compels him to speak of freedom as a human factor, and he thus brings us a step nearer to the development of the case for freedom put forward so strongly by Cournot and Renouvier and by the neo-spiritualists.
