[24] Preface to _Essais de Critique générale_.
[25] The English word “_criticism_” is, it should be noted, translated in French by “_critique_” and not by the word “_criticisme_,” a term which is used for the philosophy of the _Kritik_ of Kant.
[26] In recognising the primacy of the moral or practical reason in Kant, Renouvier resembles Fichte.
[27] Renouvier’s phenomenalism should be compared with that of Shadworth Hodgson, as set forth in the volumes of his large work on _The Metaphysic of Experience_, 1899. Hodgson has given his estimate of Renouvier and his relationship to him in _Mind_ (volume for 1881).
[28] _Psychologie de Hume : Traité de la Nature humaine_, Renouvier Préface par Pillon, p. lxviii.
It may be doubted whether Pillon’s eulogy is altogether sound in its approval of the “reconciliation” of Hume and Kant, for such a reconciliation of opposites may well appear impossible. Renouvier himself faced this problem of the reconciliation of opposites when at an early age he inclined to follow the Hegelian philosophy, a doctrine which may very well be described as a “reconciliation of opposites,” _par excellence_. Dissatisfied, however, with such a scheme Renouvier came round to the Kantian standpoint and then passed beyond it to a position absolutely contrary to that of Hegel. This position is frankly that opposites cannot be reconciled, one or the other must be rejected. Renouvier thus made the law of contradiction the basis of his philosophy, as it is the basis of our principles of thought or logic.
He rigorously applied this principle to that very interesting part of Kant’s work, the antinomies, which he held should never have been formulated. The reasons put forward for this statement were two: the principle of contradiction and the law of number. Renouvier did not believe in what mathematicians call an “infinite number.” He held it to be an absurd and contradictory notion, for to be a number at all it must be numerical and therefore not infinite. The application of this to the Kantian antinomies, as for example to the questions, “Is space infinite or finite? Had the world a beginning or not?” is interesting because it treats them as Alexander did the Gordian knot. The admission that space is infinite, or that the world had no beginning, involves the admission of an “infinite number,” a contradiction and an absurdity. Since, therefore, such a number is a pure fiction we _must_ logically conclude that space is finite,[29] that the world had a beginning and that the ascending series of causes has a first term, which admission involves freedom at the heart of things.