BOUTROUX, ETIENNE-ÉMILE-MARIE. - French philosopher, b. at Montrouge (Seine) on 28 July 1845, d. in Paris on 23 Nov. 1921. After completing his studies, part of which he pursued in Germany, he taught first at the lycée in 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 position at the École Normale Supérieure, and in 1885 he became professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris. Elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1898, he was admitted to the Académie Française in 1912.
His principal work is the 1874 doctoral thesis: *De la contingence des lois de la nature*, a slim volume (170 pages in octavo, of which 40 are conclusions) yet one that marked a turning-point in French philosophical thought. The remainder of his literary output consisted of numerous articles and several more substantial 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); *Études d'histoire de la philosophie* (1897); *Pascal* (1900); *Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine* (1908); *Nouvelles études d'histoire de la philosophie* (posthumous; Paris 1925).
As a historian of philosophy, Boutroux displayed uncommon insight and clarity. Surveying the most diverse doctrines—those of Socrates, Jacob Böhme, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, William James, Henri Poincaré, and others—he examined each from within with a sympathy that enabled him to grasp their coherence, depth, and value.
Yet his significance lies in his having opposed the prevailing scientism with a philosophy of contingency.
The unceasing advance of the sciences and their positivistic interpretation had led to the conception of reality as subject to rigid determinism, whereby every change or novelty was merely the equivalent, under another form, of pre-existing states. The refrain ran: “Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed.” Inflexible laws embedded in beings governed their activity and mutual relations. The rigidity of the material world was extended to the spiritual world, both because the latter was held to depend on the former and because psychological acts were subjected to the same determinism as physical or biological events. H. Spencer was the leading exponent of this current of thought, which treated a higher degree of being as merely a higher degree of complexity and held that the formation and dissolution of combinations obey universal laws incompatible with any genuine freedom.
Boutroux, however, observed that such a conception implied that in the facts of experience the consequent was always the quantitative equivalent of the antecedent and nothing more. This supposition is at odds with the facts: quantity is never alone but is always accompanied by quality, which has no quantitative equivalent; motion does not vanish to become heat but persists beneath II. Moreover, there are different grades of being—mineral, living, thinking. The appearance of a higher grade must indeed coincide with a determinate act of matter, yet it neither identifies with that act nor can be caused by it; on the contrary, the higher forms are the cause of the material conditions they require. One may perhaps conceive the history of beings as a continuous evolution, yet this evolution is at the same time a continuous creation: the higher never arises from the lower but always repeats its origin from above. Thus one escapes the necessity bound up with a purely quantitative conception and recognizes the existence of quality and finality. Finality presupposes at least one supreme, intelligent, and free principle—God, the author and ruler of the universe—who imparts to the higher grades of being their power over the lower.
These ideas of Boutroux’s, so at odds with the dominant university climate of his day, subsequently reappeared—albeit in new guise and with various refinements—in the systems of Bergson and Blondel and inspired the philosophy of science that emerged at the turn of the century in the works of Poincaré, Duhem, and Le Roy.
If God’s freedom is the ultimate ground of the world’s contingency, then the relation of man to God—which constitutes religion—demands philosophical scrutiny. Boutroux devoted a volume to the religious problem under the title *Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine* (Paris 1908). After delineating the differences between the scientific and the religious spirit, he shows how, even when the demands of the scientific spirit are satisfied, man remains unsatisfied. The sense of the worth and interests of the individual person, the impulse to sacrifice oneself for others, belong to a domain not that of science and require religion. Human action cannot be accomplished without faith, without an ideal, without love. Now faith is adherence to duty, the ideal is the dream of the infinite, and love is union with God. The life that results, and which is exemplified in the great mystics, realizes true religion—active and universalist. Boutroux also endeavours, though unfortunately with too vague phrases and inconsistent ideas, to maintain the compatibility of true religion with the dogmas and rhythms of Christianity: an attempt