a number of less notable individuals. Lequier, as a former polytechnicien a
scientist rather than a trained philosopher, produced a book in 1865 anticipat-
ing themes of Boutroux, Bergson, James, Peirce, and Whitehead. Hamelin, in
the neo-critical camp, developed Renouvier’s criticism of Kant into a deduction
of the categories from the category of relationship and proposed a dialectical
evolution of reality from complementary opposites (1907). Fouillée, a lycée
and ENS teacher of the 1860s and 1870s who because of health retired early,
brought out a series of books from the 1870s through 1911 expounding an
idea-force intermediate between private consciousness and objective things.
Fouillée’s stepson Guyau in 1885 used the idées-forces as the basis for a
anti-formalist morality: not principles but feelings of obligation are the com-
mon denominator of all varied actions which people throughout the world
have held to be moral (EP, 1967: 3:397–398; Copleston, 1950–1977: 9:174–
177). The source is not a spiritual or rational realm imposed from above but
vital moral impulses founded in biology. Life is action, and reflection merely
inhibits spontaneity. Guyau shared the anti-clerical mood of the times; he
condemned celibacy as the antithesis of life-morality, and proposed a religion
of dependence on the universe, with man as his own savior.
Guyau died young after a life of illness; his work, containing much of the
flamboyance of Nietzsche and Bergson, was overshadowed by that of his
contemporaries. Here again we see that a rich combination of cultural capitals
tends to be exploited simultaneously by various thinkers (we could add here
Meyerson and Driesch in the movement of scientists against positivism); the
narrow focus of attention enforced by the law of small numbers guaranteed
that most of these names would be reduced to obscurity by the fame of the
others. Guyau was on the periphery, a dropout from an academic career, after
a short period of teaching at the elite Lycée Condorcet, where Bergson was a
pupil, and Sartre later was to teach. Like his stepfather Fouillée, Guyau wrote
as a freelancer; he had just enough connections to the intellectual center to
carry on its themes, but worked in an isolation that fed his radicalism.
Bergson eclipsed everyone else in the vitalist slot, wielding many of the
same ingredients but presented with superior literary skill which opened them
to the widest popular audience. His career began in the organizational center
of French academia; he studied at the ENS under Boutroux, in the same cohort
as Durkheim and Jaurès, subsequently the socialist leader. Bergson spent 16
years teaching at lycées in the provinces and in Paris before being elected to
the Collège de France in 1900; in his later career he lectured from an honorific
position to the general public. Bergson was a skilled technical philosopher,
open to the themes of the new disciplines; his works during the lycée phase
drew on research in psychology, but harnessed to traditional philosophical
issues of free will, matter, and time. Bergson’s stance was to use empirical
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^763