Modern French Philosophy | Page 4

original thinker who laid the foundations of modern French psychology and who was, we may note in passing, a contemporary of Chateaubriand. A certain tone of romanticism marks the work of both the literary man and the philosopher. Maine de Biran was not a thinker who reflected upon his own experiences in retreat from the world. Born a Count, a Lifeguardsman to Louis XVI. at the Revolution, and faithful to the old aristocracy, he was appointed, at the Restoration, to an important administrative position, and later became a deputy and a member of the State Council. His writings were much greater in extent than is generally thought, but only one important work appeared in publication during his lifetime. This was his treatise, or _mémoire_, entitled Habitude, which appeared in 1803. This work well illustrates Maine de Biran's historical position in the development of French philosophy. It came at a tome when attention and interest, so far as philosophical problems were concerned, centred round two "foci." These respective centres are indicated by Destutt de Tracy,_*_ the disciple of Condillac on the one hand, and by Cabanis_/-_ on the other. Both were "ideologues" and were ridiculed by Napoleon who endeavoured to lay much blame upon the philosophers. We must notice, however, this difference. While the school of Condillac,_/=_ influenced by Locke, endeavoured to work out a psychology in terms of abstractions, Cabanis, anxious to be more concrete, attempted to interpret the life of the mind by reference to physical and physiological phenomena.
[Footnote _*_ : Destutt de Tracy, 1754-1836. His Elements of Ideology appeared in 1801. He succeeded Cabanis in the Académie in 1808, and in a complimentary Discours pronounced upon his predecessor claimed that Cabanis had introduced medicine into philosophy and philosophy into medicine. This remark might well have been applied later to Claude Bernard.]
[Footnote _/-_ : Cabanis, 1757-1808, _Rapports du Physique et du Morale de l'Homme_, 1802. He was a friend of De Biran, as also was Ampère, the celebrated physicist and a man of considerable philosophical power. A group used to meet chez Cabanis at Auteuil, comprising De Biran, Cabanis, Ampère, Royard-Collard, Guizot, and Cousin.]
[Footnote _/=_ : Condillac belongs to the eighteenth century. He died in 1780. His _Traité des Sensations_ is dated 1754.]
It is the special merit of De Biran that he endeavoured, and that successfully, to establish both the concreteness and the essential spirituality of the inner life. The attitude and method which he adopted became a force in freeing psychology, and indeed philosophy in general, from mere play with abstractions. His doctrines proved valuable, too, in establishing the reality and irreducibility of the mental or spiritual nature of man.
Maine de Biran took as his starting-point a psychological fact, the reality of conscious effort. The self is active rather than speculative; the self is action or effort-- that is to say, the self is, fundamentally and primarily, will. For the Cartesian formula _Cogito, ergo sum,_ De Biran proposed to substitute that of _Volo, ergo sum_. He went on to maintain that we have an internal and immediate perception of this effort of will through which we realise, at one and the same time, our self in its fullest activity and the resistance to its operations. In such effort we realise ourselves as free causes and, in spite of the doctrine of physical determinism, we realise in ourselves the self as a cause of its own volitions. The greater the resistance or the greater the effort, the more do we realise ourselves as being free and not the absolute victims of habit. Of this freedom we have an immediate consciousness, it is _une donnée immédiate de la conscience._
This freedom is not always realised, for over against the tendency to action we must set the counter-tendency to passivity. Between these two exists, in varying degrees of approach to the two extremes, habitude. Our inner life is seen by the psychologist as a field of conflict between the sensitive and the reflective side of our nature. It is this which gives to the life of this homo duplex all the elements of struggle and tragedy. In the desires and the passions, says Maine de Biran, the true self is not seen. The true self appears in memory, reasoning and, above all, in will.
Such, in brief, is the outline of De Biran's psychology. To his two stages, vie sensitive and vie active (_ou réflexive_), he added a third, la vie divine. In his religious psychology he upheld the great Christian doctrines of divine love and grace as against the less human attitude of the Stoics. He still insists upon the power of will and action and is an enemy of the religious vice of quietism. In his closing years De Biran penned his ideas upon our realisation of the divine love by