[54] The same year in which the philosophic interest in France, growing since 1870, and keener in the eighties, led to the foundation of the famous _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_ by Xavier Léon. In 1876 (the same year in which Professor Croom Robertson in England established the periodical _Mind_) Ribot had founded the _Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger_. These journals, along with the teaching in the Lycées, have contributed to make the French people the best educated, philosophically, of any people.
[55] It is interesting to note that this designation has been used by its author to replace his original term “_pragmatisme_,” which he employed in 1888 and abandoned upon becoming acquainted with the theory of Peirce and James, and with their use of the term in another manner, with which he did not agree. See _Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie_, 1902.
Blondel, however, leads us beyond this subjectivity, for it is not the will which causes what is. Far from that, he maintains that in so far as it wills it implies something which it does not and cannot create of itself; it wills to be what it is not yet. We do not act for the mere sake of acting, but for some end, something beyond the particular act. Action is not self-contained or self- sufficing: it is a striving to further attainment or achievement. It therefore pre-supposes some reality beyond itself. Here appear the elements of “passion” and “suffering” due to resistance, for all action involves some opposition. In particular moral action implies this resistance and a consciousness of power to overcome the resistance, and it therefore involves a reality which transcends the sphere in which we act.
Owing to this inequality between the power and the wish, we are obliged to complete our actions or our activity in general by a belief in a Reality beyond. It is, however, “a beyond that is within,” a Divine power immanent in man. This view, Blondel claims, unites the idea of God “transcendent” with the idea of God as “immanent.” Man’s action partakes of both, for in so far as it results from his own will it is immanent; transcendence is, however, implied in the fact that the end of man’s action as a whole is not “given.” Blondel leads us to a conception of a religious idealism in which every act of our ordinary existence leads ultimately to a religious faith. Every action is sacramental. Blondel and his follower Laberthonnière, who has taken up this idea from his master in his volume of _Essais de Philosophie réligieuse_ (1901), go beyond a purely pragmatist or voluntarist position by finding the supreme value of all action, and of the universe, not in will but in love. For Blondel this word is no mere sentiment or transient feeling, but a concrete reality which is the perfection of will and of intellect alike, of action and of knowledge. The “Philosophy of Action,” asserts Blondel, includes the “Philosophy of the Idea.” In the fact of love, he claims, is found the perfect unity between the self and the non-self, the ground of personality and its relation to the totality of persons, producing a unity in which each is seen as an end to others as well as to himself. “Love,” says Laberthonnière, “is the first and last word of all. It is the principle, the means and the end. It is in loving that one gets away from self and raises oneself above one’s temporal individuality. It is in loving that one finds God and other beings, and that one finds oneself.” It is, in short, these idealists claim, the _Summum Bonum_; in it is found the Absolute which philosophers and religious mystics of all ages have ever sought.