Taine’s positivism, however, was not so rigid as to exclude a belief in the value of metaphysics. It is this which distinguishes him from the Comtian School. We see in him the confidence in science complemented by an admission of metaphysics, equivalent to a turning of “positivism” in science and philosophy against itself. Much heavier onslaughts upon the sovereignty of science came, however, from the thinker who is the great logician and metaphysician of our period, Renouvier. To him and to Cournot we now turn.
While Taine had indeed maintained the necessity of a metaphysic, he shared to a large degree the general confidence in science displayed by Comte, Bernard, Berthelot and Renan. But the second and third groups of thinkers into which we have divided our period took up first a critical attitude to science and, finally, a rather hostile one.
Cournot marks the transition between Comte and Renouvier. His _Essai sur les Fondements de nos Connaissances et sur les Caractères de la Critique philosophique_ contains some very calm and careful thought on the relation of science and philosophy, which is the product of a sincere and well-balanced mind.[16] He inherits from the positivists an intense respect for scientific knowledge, and remarks at the outset that he is hostile to any philosophy which would be so foolish as to attempt to ignore the work of the modern sciences.
[16] See in particular the second chapter of vol. 2, _Du Contraste de la Science et de la Philosophie et de la Philosophie des Sciences_, pp. 216-255.
His work _Matérialisme, Vitalisme, Rationalisme_ is a striking example of this effort on Cournot’s part, being devoted to a study of the use which can be made in philosophy of the data afforded by the sciences. Somewhat after the manner of Comte, Cournot looks upon the various sciences as a hierarchy ranging from mathematics to sociology. Yet he reminds the scientists of the insufficiency of their point of view, for the sciences, rightly pursued, lead on to philosophy. He laments, however, the confusion of the two, and thinks that such confusion is “partly due to the fact that in the realm of speculations which are naturally within the domain of the philosopher, there are to be found here and there certain theories which can actually be reduced to a scientific form”[17] He offers, as an instance of this, the theory of the syllogism, which has affinities to algebraical equations—but this interpenetration should not cause us, he argues, to abandon or to lose sight of the distinction between science and philosophy.