BOUTROUX, ÉTIENNE-ÉMILE-MARIE. - French philosopher, b. at Montrouge (Seine) on 28 July 1845 and d. at Paris on 23 Nov. 1921. After completing his studies, part of which he carried out in Germany, he first taught at the lycée of Caen, then at the Universities of Montpellier and Nancy, and in 1874 he defended his doctoral theses at the Sorbonne. Three years later he took up a teaching post at the École Normale Supérieure and in 1885 became professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris. Elected a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1898, he entered the Académie française in 1912.
His fundamental work is his doctoral thesis of 1874: De la contingence des lois de la nature, a small book in size (170 pages in 8vo, of which 40 are conclusions), but one that marked a turning point in philosophical thought in France. The rest of his literary activity unfolded in numerous articles and some more important books: De l'idée de loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie (1895; Italian trans. by E. Liguori-Barbieri, Florence 1925); Questions de morale et d'éducation (1895); Etudes d'histoire de la philosophie (1897); Pascal (1900); Sciences et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine (1908); Nouvelles études d'histoire de la philosophie (posthumous; Paris 1925).
As a historian of philosophy, B. had uncommon gifts of penetration and clarity. Presenting the most diverse doctrines: those of Socrates, of Jacob Böhme, of Pascal, of Leibniz, of Kant, of William James, of Henri Poincaré, etc., he examines them from within with a sympathy that allows him to grasp their coherence, their depth, their value.
His importance, however, lies in having opposed to triumphant scientism his philosophy of contingency.
The incessant development of the sciences and the positivist interpretation of them had led to conceiving reality as subject to a rigid determinism, whereby every change, every novelty was nothing but the equivalent, under another form, of pre-existing positions. It was repeated: "Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed." Inflexible laws included in beings regulated their activity and their mutual relations. The rigidity of the world of matter was extended to the world of the spirit, both because the latter depends on the former and because the same determinism of physical or biological facts was applied to psychological acts. H. Spencer was the leader of this current of thought, which regarded a higher degree of being as a simple higher degree of complexity, and held that the making and unmaking of combinations obeys universal laws, incompatible with any true freedom.
Now, B. observed, such a conception implied that in the facts of experience the consequent was always the quantitative equivalent of the antecedent and nothing else. Such a supposition is not in accord with the facts: quantity is never alone, but always stands with and beneath quality, which has no quantitative equivalent: motion does not disappear in order to become heat, but subsists beneath the heat. Moreover there are different degrees of beings: the mineral, the living, the thinking. The appearance of a higher degree must indeed coincide with a determinate act of matter, but is not identified with it nor can it be caused by it; on the contrary, the higher forms are the cause of the material conditions of which they have need. One may perhaps conceive the history of beings as a continuous evolution, but this evolution is at the same time a continuous creation: the higher never comes from the lower, but always repeats its origin from above. Thus one is outside the necessity bound to the purely quantitative conception, and the existence of quality and of finality is recognized. Finality supposes at least a supreme principle, intelligent and free, God, author and ruler of the universe, who communicates to the higher degrees of being their power over the lower.
These thoughts of B., so contrary to those then dominant in university circles, are found again later, though in a new guise and with various retouchings, in the systems of Bergson and of Blondel, just as they inspired the philosophy of the sciences that appeared at the close of the century in the books of Poincaré, of Duhem, of Le Roy.
If the freedom of God is the ultimate reason for the contingency of the world, man's relations with God, which constitute religion, impose themselves on the philosopher's study. B. devoted to the religious problem a volume entitled: Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine (Paris 1908). After showing the differences between the scientific spirit and the religious spirit, he shows how, even when the demands of the scientific spirit are satisfied, man is not entirely satisfied. The feeling of the value and of the interests of the individual person, the tendency to sacrifice oneself for other persons, belong to a field that is not the scientific one and that has need of religion. Human action is not accomplished without faith, without ideal, without love. Now faith is adherence to duty, the ideal is the dream of the infinite, love is union with God. The life that results from this and that appears in the great mystics realizes the true religion, active and universalist. B. also strives, but unfortunately with phrases too vague and with ideas too inconsistent, to maintain the compatibility of the true religion with the dogmas and rites of Christianity: an attempt sympathetic, but inconclusive because weakened by a certain latent rationalism that introduces too absolute a distinction between the scientific spirit and the religious spirit, as between morality and religion.
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Carlo Boyer