religion. In effect, Renouvier took the Cousinian eclectic curriculum and drew
from it a moralizing lesson. His neo-criticism of the 1850s and 1860s expounds
the history of philosophy, not as a progressive sequence in the manner of
Comte, but as the irreducible opposition of one-sided positions. Human knowl-
edge is relativistic, consisting only in the apprehension of oppositions; that one
can choose among the sides is an expression of individual personality and an
indicator of human freedom.
Educational reform under the Third Republic did not fundamentally change
the career hierarchy of academic jobs. Under the slogan of catching up with
the German system, promoted by Renan and Taine since the 1860s, there were
some moves in the direction of decentralization and autonomy among regional
universities. Policy toward the independent Catholic faculties went through
a series of reversals, complicated by the contradiction between liberal reform-
ers’ desire for decentralization and their drive for state-imposed secularism.
Throughout these shifts, state examinations still controlled the content of the
curriculum, and the best careers flowed from the Paris training schools through
a tour of the provinces and back to one of the elite showcases in Paris (Fabiani,
1988; Weisz, 1983). During the period of Catholic control of education, the
natural sciences had been excluded, and the lycée was largely humanistic,
stressing classical languages, history, and literature. Pressure to reform the
curriculum, and to displace the humanities from their privileged position in
the sequence of requirements, threatened the legitimating image of philosophy
as the integrator of specialized knowledge, which could be maintained only so
long as philosophy was the required subject at the end of the secondary
curriculum.
Philosophers generally allied with conservatives in defense of their disci-
pline; a majority joined the spiritualist camp, upholding subjective and ideal
values against science. Typical was Lachelier, a normalien, educational admin-
istrator and inspector general, who led the neo-spiritualist movement, uphold-
ing skepticism against sensory phenomena and the world external to thought.
His pupil Boutroux, fortified by a year with the Neo-Kantian Zeller at Heidel-
berg, became especially influential after he returned to teach at the ENS in the
1880s, arguing for the contingency of the laws of nature. At the same time,
the battle for university reform in the 1870s and 1880s raised ambitions on
the part of philosophy students willing to break from the conservative path.
Ribot, Binet, Janet, Durkheim, and Lévy-Bruhl carved out new scientific disci-
plines on the turf of philosophy, giving rise to specialized social sciences, the
anti-metaphysical disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology (Fabi-
ani, 1988).
It was in the context of this conflict that vitalism became prominent.
Bergson reaped the greatest fame, but the movement could be discerned among
762 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths