[8] Renouvier’s great objection to Comte’s work was due to his disagreement with Comte’s conception of Humanity. To Renouvier, with his intense valuation of personality, this Comtian conception was too much of an abstraction.
It is erroneous to look upon it as either the fatalistic functioning of a law of things or as the results of the action of an all-powerful Deity or Providence. Neither the “scientific” view of determinism nor the theological conception of God playing with loaded dice, says Renouvier, will explain history. It is the outcome of human action, of personal acts which have real worth and significance in its formation. History is no mere display of marionettes, no Punch-and-Judy show with a divine operator pulling strings from his concealed position behind the curtain. Equally Renouvier disagrees with the view that history is merely an unrolling in time of a plan conceived from eternity. Human society and civilisation (of which history is the record) are products of man’s own thought and action, and in consequence manifest discontinuity, freedom and contingency. Renouvier thus opposes strongly all those thinkers, such as the Saint-Simonists, Hegelians and Positivists, who see in history only a fatalistic development. He joins battle especially with those who claim that there is a fatalistic or necessitated progress. History has no law, he claims, and there is not and cannot be any law of progress.
The idea of progress is certainly, he admits, one with which the philosopher is brought very vitally into contact in his survey of history. Indeed an elucidation of, this notion might itself be a part of the historian’s task. If so, the historians have sadly neglected part of their work. Renouvier calls attention to the fact that all those historians or philosophers who accept a comforting doctrine of humanity’s assured progress make very plausible statements, but they never seem able to state with any clearness or definiteness what constitutes progress, or what significance lies in their oft-repeated phrase, “the law of progress.” He rightly points out that this insistence upon a law, coupled with a manifest inability to indicate what it is, causes naturally a certain scepticism as to there being any such law at all.