The French spirit in philosophy stands for clearness, concreteness and vitality. Consequently it presents a far greater brilliance, richness and variety than German philosophy displays.[1] This vitality and even exuberance, which are those of the spirit of youth manifesting a _joie de vivre_ or an _élan vital_, have been very strongly marked since the year 1880, and have placed French philosophy in the van of human thought.
[1] It is, therefore to be lamented that French thought has not received the attention which it deseives. In England far more attention has been given to the nineteenth-century German philosophy, while the history of thought in France, especially in the period between Comte and Bergson, has remained in sad neglect. This can and should be speedily remedied.
It would be vain to ask whither its advance will lead. Even its own principles prevent any such forecast; its creative richness may blossom forth to-morrow in forms entirely new, for such is the characteristic of life itself, especially the life of the spirit, upon which so much stress is laid in modern French philosophy. The New Idealism lays great stress upon dynamism, voluntarism or action. Freedom and creative activity are its keynotes, and life, ever fuller and richer, is its aspiration. _La Vie_, of which France (and its centre, Paris) is such an expression, finds formulation in the philosophy of contemporary thinkers.[2]
[2] The student of comparative thought will find it both interesting and profitable to compare the work done recently in Italy by Croce and Gentile. The intellectual kinship of Croce and Bergson has frequently been pointed out, but Gentile’s work comes very close to the philosophy of action and to the whole positive-idealistic tendency of contemporary French thought. This is particularly to be seen in _L’atto del pensare come atto puro_ (1912), and in _Teoria generalo dello spirito come atto puro_ (1916). Professor Carr, the well-known exponent of Bergson’s philosophy, remarks in his introduction to the English edition of Gentile’s book, “We may individualise the mind as a natural thing-object person. . . . Yet our power to think the mind in this way would be impossible were not the mind with and by which we think it, itself not a thing, not a _fact_, but _act_; . . . never _factum_, but always _fieri_.” This quotation is from p. xv of the _Theory of Mind as Pure Act_. With one other quotation direct from Gentile we must close this reference to Italian neo-idealism. “In so far as the subject is constituted a subject by its own act it constitutes the object. . . . Mind is the transcendental activity productive of the objective world of experience” (pp. 18, 43). Compare with this our quotation from Ravaisson, given on p. 75 of this work, and the statement by Lachelier on p. 122, both essential principles of the French New Idealism.