[35] This is Guyau’s word to describe Renouvier, whom he regards as far too much under the influence of Kant.
[36] _Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction_, p. 223.
While Fouillée and, more especially, Guyau were thus outlining an ethic marked by a strong humanitarianism, a more definitely religious ethic was being proclaimed by that current of philosophy of belief and of action which has profoundly associated itself in its later developments with “Modernism” in the Roman Church. The tendency to stress action and the practical reason is noticeable in the work of Brochard, Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, also in Rauh. They agree with Renouvier in advocating the primacy of the practical reason, but their own reasons for this are different from his, or at least in them the reasons are more clearly enunciated. Plainly these reasons lie in the difficulties of intellectualism and the quest of truth. They propose the quest of the good in the hope of finding in that sphere some objectivity, some absolute, in fact, which they cannot find out by intellectual searching. They correspond in a somewhat parallel fashion to the philosophy of intuition with its rejection of intellectualism as offering a final solution. These thinkers desire by action, by doing the will, to attain to a knowledge of the doctrine. The first word in their gospel is—
It is for them the beginning and the end. Their certainty is an act of belief, which grows out of action and life. It is a curious mixture of insistence upon life and action, such as we find in Guyau and in Bergson, coupled with a religious Platonism. Brochard’s work is of this type. He wrote as early as 1874 on _La Responsabilité morale_, and in 1876 on _L’Universalité des Notions morales_. Three years later appeared his work _L’Erreur_. Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, who best represent this tendency, do not like Guyau’s ethics, which lacks the religious idealism which they consider should be bound up with morality. This was the thesis developed in the volume _La Certitude morale_, written by Ollé-Laprune in 1881. “By what right,” says Ollé-Laprune in his subsequent book _Le Prix de la Vie_ (1895), “can Guyau speak of a high exalted life, of a moral ideal? It is impossible to speak so when you have only a purely naturalistic ethic; for merely to name these things is an implication that there is not only intensity in life, but also quality. You suppress duty because you can see in it only a falsely mystical view of life and of nature. What you fail to realise is that between duty and life there is a profound agreement. You reduce duty to life, and in life itself you consider only its quantity and intensity, and regard as illusion everything that is of a different order from the natural physical order in which you imprison yourself.”[37]