This paper studies Francisque Bouillier’s contribution to cousinian Spiritualism, from his first text on the History of Cartesian Philosophy from 1839 (revised version from 1842) to the publication of Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante (1864), a work which was likewise considerably amended as a result of the polemics it gave rise to. The paper is concerned with the reception of Leibniz in a double sense. In a positive sense, Bouillier managed to reintegrate in the caricature of the Cartesian soul conceived by the Cousinians, a force that was criticized by the latter. In a negative sense to the extent that, for Bouillier, the direct re-appropriation of Leibniz’s dynamic ontology was impossible without completely breaking with Cousin himself. Hence, Bouillier’s reception of Leibniz took the form of a progressive suppression of a monadological tendency in favor of a rehabilitation of a theory of minute perceptions. The primacy of the interior sense that results from this allowed him to construct a Descartes who is different from Cousin’s but without completely rejecting Cousin. This Descartes is probably closer to Malebranche than to Leibniz. In order, however, to understand this movement in the history of ideas and its lasting echoes in the history of philosophy, a simply study of the reception does not suffice. One must moreover study the importance of a whole series of mediations and prisms that constitute Bouillier’s intellectual framework. Here, I have focused on three such prisms : (1) the Cartesian prism itself, which has contributed to the identification of animism as a regression into scholasticism; (2) the Cousinian, prism, which assimilate all resurgence to culpable pantheism ; (3) the prism of the first translations and uses of the polemic between the major figure of Stahl and the way they are refracted in each other. This study is a contribution to a more general reflection on the categories and «labels» that we employ when telling, and telling ourselves, the histories of philosophy.
Nineteenth-century French ‘spiritualism’ is a paradigmatic case of a philosophical movement that is construed and mediated through the reception of early modern authors. The aim of this contribution is to study certain tensions and developments in this movement, focusing on two questions that were formulated by the philosopher Francisque Bouillier. First: Is it possible to overcome the overly narrow Cartesian conception of the soul by appealing to the dynamic ontology of Leibnizian monads? Second: Might the reference to Leibniz help to consolidate rational spiritualism, protecting it from materialist attacks, without however falling into the excesses of those physicians in the medical faculties who adhered to strong forms of animism or vitalism? The timespan studied, from the Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (1839) to the Du principe vital ou de l’âme pensante (1864), follows Cousinian eclecticism from its highpoint through its progressive institutional decline. The article combines two analytical approaches. On the one hand, I study the reception of Descartes and Leibniz in Bouillier; on the other, I study how Bouillier's readings had to be mediated through certain positions – Cartesian, Cousinian, and spiritualist-medical – in order to gain an audience. I will thus examine the passages in Bouillier's texts where institutional effects are felt and where he positions himself intellectually in relation to those institutions. At the same time, I reconstruct a philosophical scene that was asymmetrically occupied by authors all motivated by a common effort, namely, mobilizing early modern authors (here essentially Descartes and Leibniz) in order to stand out individually in a stifling institutional context.1 The analyses will mainly show how Bouillier opened up a new path for spiritualism which, by proposing new readings of Descartes and Leibniz and stressing the notion of an ‘inner sense of life', allowed for an authentic dialogue with the life sciences.
The beginning of the 1840s was a key moment for Cousinian eclecticism. Let us briefly recall who Victor Cousin (1792–867) was, and the all-important role he played in French academia in the nineteenth century. Cousin entered the French Academy and the State Council in 1830. In 1832, he became a member of the Council for Public Instruction where he was in charge of philosophy. He was elected a member of the newly created Académie des sciences morales et politiques and appointed director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In 1840, under the government of Thiers, he was minister of public instruction for some eight months. He presided over the concours d'agrégation – an essential exam for anyone wishing to enter academia – for 27 years. During the period we are concerned with, he possessed all the means necessary to fulfil his intellectual and political ambitions. But for this very reason, he was also very strongly criticized,2 mainly because his brand of Cartesianism was incapable of providing a satisfactory response to the rise of the life sciences and of responding adequately to the onslaughts against ‘pan-metaphysics’ from influential figures such as Broussais.3
The Cousinian movement was thus, somewhat paradoxically, threatened exactly because it was so powerful. Hence, when the Academie des sciences morales et politiques proposed the writing of a detailed history of Cartesianism as the theme of the 1839 competition, the aim was clear, namely exploiting all the resources of Cartesian philosophy in order to strengthen spiritualism against its adversaries. The jury included Cousin, Degérando, Damiron, St. Hilaire, Edwards, and Jouffroy. When the dissertations were submitted (anonymously), they were read by two members of the jury. Their remarks would subsequently be included in a final report, written by Damiron. Winning dissertations were intended for publication, on condition of revision following the suggestions made in the report. In 1839, seven dissertations were submitted: one arrived too late; two received the distinction ‘very honorable’ (Bouillier and Renouvier); Bordas-Demoulin won the prize. Among the remaining three contestants, the identity of only one was ever divulged: Jean-André Rochoux, a somewhat subversive nurse working at the Hospital Bicêtre. Rochoux published his dissertation at his own expense in 1843 under the title Épicure opposé à Descartes. 4
Apart from the simple servile reproduction of the Cousin's doctrine, the candidates had the choice between the following two approaches. The first was to attack Cartesianism frontally, attempting to completely overturn the philosophical landscape. This was the approach chosen by Rochoux and obviously banned him immediately from the podium of the winners. The second approach, which might be rewarded and result in the dissertation's publication, on condition of revision, would be to find ways to revise spiritualism by means of theoretical tools found outside the official doctrine of Descartes, while still remaining within the sphere of Cartesianism. Here, I study the dissertation and subsequent philosophical development written by a candidate of the second variety, namely Francisque Bouillier (1813–99). Bouillier was situated at the heart of the French Academic institution throughout his entire career. He was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1837. He obtained his agrégation in 1837 and doctorate in 1839. He was professor at the Collège d'Orléans in 1837–9, then at the Faculty of Letters in Lyon, where he was the dean from 1849 to 1864. He was rector of the Academy of Clermont-Ferrand in 1864 and general inspector of public instruction from 1864 to 1867. From 1871 to 1876, he directed the École Normale Supérieure. He was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1875 and became its president in 1889.
Rochoux summarizes very neatly what Bouillier's intentions were when submitting a dissertation for the 1839 competition:
After reporting the grueling judgment, the Ferney patriarch passes on Cartesianism (Dict. Philosophique), Mr. Libri recalls how this philosophy in our days found some eloquent defenders; but he sees in this ‘a reaction that seems excessive and consequently transient’ (Revue des deux mondes, September 1842, 742). It will not be long before his prediction is fulfilled, or rather, it already has been, according to Mr. Francisque Bouillier, one of the winners of the prize on Cartesianism. This is how this author finishes his long in-8° dedicated to the critical examination of Descartes's philosophy: ‘As a system of philosophy, Cartesianism is dead, but it has left deep traces of its passage in the sciences, for it has given nineteenth-century French philosophy its method and some of its principal results. Cartesianism is dead, but its spirit lives in us, it is the very spirit of science, philosophy and modern civilization’ (Histoire et critique de la revolution cartésienne, 442–3). Considering that a dead system lives on in spirit is one of those ingenious feats that only spiritualism is capable of. They have nothing to learn from Roland, who said of his famous mare: ‘Indeed, she is dead, but she has no other flaw I can think of’.
(Arioste, Roland furieux, t. II, c. XXX, 426, in Rochoux, Epicure opposé à Descartes, 112–113, note 2)
For Bouillier, reviving the ‘spirit’ of Cartesianism involved careful work on the central figures of the Cartesian philosophy but wholly contextualized within institutionalized Cousinian spiritualism.
In his Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, Bouillier presented a duel between the official Descartes and the Leibniz of the Monadology. This duel was, however, constantly undercut by a subtler, dialogical relation between the official Descartes, the Leibniz of the Monadology, and the Leibniz of minute perceptions. In order to understand how and why, we must read Bouillier's later work, including his generally overlooked text from 1862, the Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, ou Examen des diverses doctrines médicales et psychologiques sur les rapports de l’âme et de la vie.5 This last book should be understood in the context of a controversy between, on the one hand, the heirs of Maine de Biran6 and certain spiritualist physicians reviving animism, and, on the other, the Cousinians who were staunchly opposed to anything that had even a remote resemblance to pantheism. But in a context where King Cousin was dethroned and aging, should we interpret Bouillier's ‘third way’ as a concession to, or an attack against, those adversaries of Cousinianism?
The Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne is a work that a great many Descartes scholars continue to refer to today. The work on the vital principle, in contrast, has been largely forgotten. In order to highlight the most significant changes between the Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne and the text on the vital principle, I here refer to the second, amended edition of Bouilliers's dissertation, published in 1842 under the title Histoire et critique de la revolution cartésienne. Incidentally, this is also the text that Rochoux refers to. I will consider in what respects the Cousinian institutional and conceptual framework constrained Bouillier's attempts at becoming more autonomous and the concrete effects this had in his texts. I thus show how the logic of Bouillier's philosophical thought is tightly linked to the history of his philosophical thought.
When rewriting his Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne in view of publication, Bouillier found himself in a double-bind. On the one hand, he had to yield to the pressure of Victor Cousin and Jean-Philibert Damiron7 who both required that he put more stress on the metaphysical questions and their foundational character in the Cartesian tree of knowledge. Consequently, he should stress the distinction between the soul and the body.8 On the other, Bouillier himself wanted to point out those things which, in the institutionally dominant representation or image of Descartes, remained too ‘abstract’ or too ‘pure’ for him to give right answers to the ‘empirical philosophers'. Bouillier was thus tempted to stress the union of soul and the body while diminishing the passive dimension of the soul. But yielding to that temptation would oblige him to reattribute a kind of activity to the Cartesian soul. However, after having, at first, stressed spontaneity as being at the heart of causation, the latter being inseparable from the notion of substance, Cousin now described this notion of activity as leading on a slippery slope towards pantheism since it ‘gathers all the material and spiritual phenomena in a single, simple and indivisible subject in which all the diverse laws of nature are fulfilled'.9
What results from this intellectual tension in Bouillier's text is a reading of Descartes that, at the same time, presents him as the best dualist metaphysician of all and also as he who neglected the activity or force of the soul. For a significant example, let us consult the following passage:
One must reproach Descartes for having made the notion of spirituality foreign to the notion of force, for having underestimated the essential activity of the soul, and for having defined it by its action rather than by its essence when defining it by thought alone. But we cannot grasp thinking without a subject, nor can we grasp any of the soul's phenomena without an active principle, without a force producing them.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 65–6)
This problem expands into a general underestimation of created substances that puts Descartes on the slippery slope towards the phenomenalization of the soul's thoughts. Consequently, Descartes was left in the mercy of those physicians among Bouillier's contemporaries who also took an interest in philosophy in its official and institutional dimension, and who wanted, either to simply get rid of Descartes in order to establish a kind of materialist monism, or use mechanism in order to transform Descartes himself into a materialist. Phenomenalizing the soul's thoughts consists in considering them independently of their substratum. And from considering them as independent from this substratum to completely removing the latter, there is only a short step – a step that leads from empirical psychology to monist materialism. The dangers that Cousin had underlined regarding pantheism showed up in Descartes himself. It thus appears as if, by reason of the institutional hold that Cousin's ‘passive’ Descartes had in France, attributing activity to a soul united with the body would require getting rid of Descartes altogether. Or said in other words: granting activity to the Cartesian soul would amount to a disavowal of Cousin himself.
Such a conflict appears very clearly in the treatment Bouillier reserves for a text much underestimated by Cousin, the treatise on the Passions de l’âme (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, volume I, chap. V, livre I).
After making the soul pure thinking, Descartes should have understood the passions as pure phenomena of the body, but since he did not dare to be that rigorous, he limited himself to making the soul's contributions as small as possible, and to relating them almost exclusively to the body and the animal souls, the great material agent by means of which he explains their generation and all their movements (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 111–12).
This somatic interpretation of the passions as a unitary phenomenon culminates, in the second part of the Histoire, in a partial reading of Descartes's enumeration of the passions. While recognizing the importance of the principal ‘ways’ in which the soul relates to an exterior object in the phenomenon of passion, Bouillier maintains that the criterion's distinguishing phenomenon resides in the ‘impression’ that these objects make on the brain. Instead of being placed on the side of a soul united to a body, the question of the passions’ ‘primacy’ thus remains on the side of the body alone:
[ … ] it is in the temperament of the body, in the impressions on the brain, and in the objects that can act upon our senses that he places the most ordinary and most general cause of all our passions. We must thus examine these objects and the various impressions that they can make upon us, in order to arrive at the most complete classification possible of the soul's passions. Even though they are innumerable, they only affect us in a certain number of ways, following whether they hurt us or are profitable for us. For there are only as many primary and primitive passions, as there are basic ways in which our senses can be moved by an object.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 112)
What the Cousinian framework prevents Bouillier from stressing, and which in turn justifies the contradictions and insufficiencies that he imputes on Descartes, is thus the inner sense specific to the passions of the soul. The impossibility of formulating such passions becomes manifest once again towards the end of the chapter, where Bouillier establishes an opposition between the passions of the body and the emotions of the soul:
To the passions of the body must be opposed the inner emotions or passions of the soul, that is to say, those passions that are aroused in the soul by the soul itself and not by some movement of the animal spirits. Happiness and misery in our lives depend on these emotions in particular, since they touch us more closely. Often they are joined with corporeal passions that correspond to them, but equally often they meet with those that are contrary to them, and which serve to counterbalance them.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 117)
One ultimate and ingenious way of justifying such an approach, while still maintaining the pertinence of the dualist interpretation that Cousin inflicts upon the recalcitrant Cartesian texts, consists in suggesting that this was the solution Descartes himself proposed in relation to the scholastics. Cousin's obsessive fear of pantheism would then be nothing but the counterpart of Descartes's struggle against hylomorphism. And this double-bind, between pantheism and hylomorphism, makes it impossible to conceptualize ‘the true nature of the animal’ within the Cartesian framework alone.
[ … ] we should take care to notice that this hypothesis regarding the animal-machine stands in a close relation to the rest of Descartes's philosophy. It is not only tied to the totality of his physiology, but to the fundamental principles of his metaphysics. After having fixed the human soul exclusively in its conscious thought of itself, outside of which there is nothing but material and inert extension, after having deprived the creatures of all force and all causation and turned God into the sole force and efficient cause, where could he possibly find the principles of life and sentiment to animate the beasts? Since, according to his system, he cannot possibly give them any active force, he ought necessarily to conceive of them as pure inert matter, subjected to the general laws of movement. This is the link between the automatism of beasts and the metaphysics of Descartes. The true nature of the animal must be reestablished against Descartes.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 156–7)
The constraints that the Cousinian framework imposed on Bouillier's reception of Descartes had two consequences. On the one hand, Descartes was pulled in the direction of occasionalism, depriving creatures of all activity. On the other, Bouillier finds himself forced to turn to Leibniz, and more precisely to the Monadology, in order to conceptualize this lack of activity: ‘It is by means of Leibniz that we will correct Descartes’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 136).
The difficulty at this point, in 1854, is claiming a Leibnizian heritage while avoiding completely dismissing Descartes. He must satisfy Cousin who was in the middle of revising his Fragments de philosophie cartésienne and did not overlook any of the successive developments of Bouillier's dissertation. On this point, Bouillier prudently opts for a quantifying formula that leaves in place a small margin for ‘reform’:
Doubtless one is allowed to give this designation [i.e. reformed Cartesianism] to a philosophy about which it can be said, with Mr. Cousin, that is three-quarters that of Descartes.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 405)10
But what does the remaining quarter consist in? A Leibnizian reform of the notion of substance. Leibniz reintegrates force and activity into the essence of substance without however going back to ‘the naked force of scholasticism’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 411). By replacing substantial extension with monads he, ‘finally', replaces the outdated notions of the scholastics that Descartes had been right to reject. But he also rejects something that, when described in these terms, can no longer be described as a merely anecdotal ‘quarter', namely Descartes's own metaphysics. Bouillier uses a detour via occasionalism to describe this metaphysics in the very same terms as those Cousin used to describe the dangers of pantheism and Spinozism:
By correcting the fundamental error of Cartesianism, he also finds the remedy for Spinozism. Here we finally have real and persistent substances that are as different from the phenomena as they are from the infinite substance itself, and not just ghostly substances without consistence or action that are absorbed into the true cause and the unique true substance. If there are no such substances, there are no obstacles to pantheism. Without monads, as Leibniz says it very well, Spinoza would be right.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 412)
Bouillier reproached Descartes for thinking man as a soul distinct from a body with which no real, effective synergy is possible. To this, he now opposed a Leibniz who, by way of reaction, reaffirmed the ‘indissoluble union of the soul with its organs’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 433). In Leibniz, however, the theory of pre-established harmony had the disadvantage of reintroducing, within Leibniz's own system, a principle of passivity that pulls Leibniz towards occasionalism and runs counter to the principles of the monadology: ‘There is thus a true contradiction between the essential principles of monadology and pre-established harmony, in such a way that it seems necessary to sacrifice pre-established harmony in order to save the monad’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 473). When defending the notion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz is as close to a Descartes incapable of conceptualizing action as he is to a Malebranche inclining towards Spinoza. What is lacking in both occasionalism – including Cartesian occasionalism – and pre-established harmony is a veritable notion of activity.
In 1854, the winner of the competition thus found himself in an impasse. Descartes was too much of a support for the system he was fighting. But if the very definition of Cartesianism would have to be changed, and if official Cartesianism was too dominant to make such change possible, maybe it was time to kill Rochoux's mare and renounce on Cartesianism altogether? And if there was truth be found on the side of Leibniz, maybe one should in fact return more decisively to him. But this would have to be done in such a way that it allowed the conceptualization of a new animism without any risk of materialism and pantheism, and consequently by downplaying if not outright rejecting the passivity reintroduced by the Leibnizian conception of pre-established harmony. In the Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, Bouillier only hinted at his solution to the problem once. Hence, while speaking of Leibniz and of some future project not yet realized, he upholds the ideal of a ‘doctrine of the unitary principle of life and thought’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 422). But what this referred to was not a simple return to Leibniz. It was rather a personal position that Bouillier adopted in a contemporary intellectual debate about animism. Leibniz, in other words, was nothing but a means to intervene in this debate.
In the context of the debates on animism, it is important to note that most participants claimed Cousin's authority, or that they all attempted to align Cousin's position with their own. As an example, I take the discussions around the Introduction à la philosophie médicale by Richard de Laprade. This dissertation, presented to the Academy of Lyon in July 1860 shortly before Laprade's death and subsequently published by his son under the title Animisme et vitalisme,11 defends the animist position adopted by the physicians of the Montpellier School against Bouillier. He described the commotion Bouillier had occasioned among organicist physicians, even among those who were supporters of the Cousinian school. The organicists were those physicians, spiritualist or not, who believed that the consideration of organic life should be put at the heart of the reflection on the nature of the soul. He also cited statements by Cousin seemingly going in the direction of animism and organicism:
Mr. Cousin's opinion is even more explicit: ‘My conviction is that under these different organs there is a force that makes them act and concur towards life; a force that, when the exercise of the functions has been upset, will intervene by means of external stimuli and internal affections and reestablishes more or less the harmony among the functions, or even the workings of each function. At all times, some force has been admitted, be it obscurely and by means of designations that were more or less precise, such as Plato's appetitive soul, Aristotle's sensitive soul, or the conserving or mediating soul evoked by certain more modern physiologists. It is a force that cannot be denied, on pains of falling into the kind of crude materialism that only sees organs in the body, or loosing oneself in a subtle and chimerical spiritualism that confounds the vital principle with the principle of spiritual life itself.
(Laprade, Animisme et vitalisme, 4)
Responding to Laprade in the 1862 version of his dissertation, Bouillier blew his own Cousinian cover. First, Bouillier argued, Laprade reported only oral statements12 that were published nowhere by Cousin. There was thus nothing to guarantee their authenticity. Secondly, there was surely one text where Cousin praised animism, namely in his edition of the Phaedo. But this remained indirect praise stated in the context of the examination of a philosophy other than his own, namely Platonism. Consequently, there were concerns about intellectual honesty in relation to Laprade's reading, warranting the greatest prudence in relation to his account of Cousin's position: ‘It is more exact to say that, to our regret, Mr. Cousin has not treated in any particular way this question on which he could have enlightened us, as he has on a great many others’ (Bouillier, Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, 297).13 In fact, Cousin had discussed animism with Bouillier on a prior occasion. But the replies Cousin had given did not really have a bearing on the truth of the doctrine. They highlighted the ‘advantages’ of the thesis, namely its greater ability to ward off the materialist enemy than Maine de Biran's brand of animism. Cousin's reply to Bouillier was thus situated on a strategic terrain and did not concern his personal position. But importantly it did not indicate how to take into account the organicist position:
I must admit that your opinion regarding the identification of the principle of life and thought does not appeal to me, accustomed as I am to judge the principles by the phenomena which are here entirely different. Moreover, I do not really see the advantages of this delicate discussion for the present state of philosophy. It is important that we focus our forces on the points under threat, including the spirituality of the soul and the essential distinction between God and the world.
(Latreille, Francisque Bouillier, 226–7. The letter is dated 15 November 1859)
Bouillier responded to Cousin in the very first line of the new preface of Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante:
[ … ] how temerarious it is pretending to overturn the doctrine of the soul's duality and of life established so solidly by Maine de Biran and by Jouffroy within spiritualist philosophy and wanting to rehabilitate – and this not without risks for the spirituality of the soul – the universally rejected animist hypothesis! How imprudent, in these times, to present to sceptics and materialists the pleasant spectacle of serious dissidence among the spiritualist philosophers! We reply, first of all, that it is a question of truth and not tactics; and besides, it is my firm conviction that the doctrine I would like to triumph would result in the strengthening and not the downfall of spiritualism.
(VI–VII)14
Bouillier's objective in the second revised version of the book on the vital principle was thus to show the way in which animism, while promoting a doctrine that unified the soul and the vital principle, allowed him to respond to the organicists, both spiritualist and non-spiritualist, better than the followers of Biran could do.
Bouillier's classes at the Faculty of Letters in Lyon – classes that formed the basis for his last publications – were dedicated to this question regarding the unity of the vital principle and the thinking soul. He presented a first summary of this work to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, and then published it in 1858. Subsequently, he continued to work on it, after it provoked heated discussions not only with the medical schools and in particular with the organicists, but also within his own spiritualist camp.
The terms of the debate thus changed between the history of Cartesian philosophy and the dissertation on the vital principle. While Cousin placed Bouillier in an antagonistic position in relation to the physicians, Bouillier now came to share terrain with them. The spiritualist reflection on the soul did not exclude a priori every possible organicist consideration. In order to negotiate that terrain theoretically, Bouillier constantly produced bifurcations in theories that Cousin presented as uniform. He thus has a double Descartes, a double Leibniz, a double spiritualism, a double organicism, etc. Each of these Descartes, Leibniz, spiritualism, organicism, reflect and refract the constraints of the institutions that he takes part in. These multiple bifurcations are characteristic and original in Bouillier's readings, making him stand out as someone who always proposed a ‘third way'. One can identify three discursive, conceptual or even political strategies, aiming at cleverly circumventing the Cousinian constraints. I here list them in an order going from the most polemical to the most conciliatory: (1) A strategy that inverts the Cousinian project itself and which consists in relating the defects of Cartesianism to abusive organicism. (2) A strategy that consists in showing that, in Descartes, those defects stem from the firm stance he had to adopt in the polemics opposing him to the scholastics. (3) Finally, a strategy that consists in associating himself with the most orthodox among the Cousinians, namely Damiron. Let us consider these three strategies one by one.
The strategy of inversion. The text on the vital principle is original in relation to the dissertation on Descartes in that it makes use of an argument, found among most empiricist thinkers from the time of Descartes and the physiologists of the nineteenth century, according to which Cartesian mechanism leaves vacant a whole theoretical area that needs explaining, namely that of vital phenomena. Among Descartes's contemporaries, Bouillier in particular refers to a letter where Descartes comments on the first physiological theses of the Utrecht physician Regius, reproaching him for not having gone far enough in his mechanical explanation of life and having left ‘a greater difference between living and non-living things than between a clock and any other automaton’ (For the texts by Descartes quoted here, see Victor Cousin, Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris, 1824–6) vol. 8, 628). This passage is emblematic of the Cartesian excess, but it also indicated that mechanism had to be corrected or completed when it came to vital phenomena, including for an empiricist like Regius. As for what concerns the French physicians and physiologists of the nineteenth century, none of them claimed to explain the organic functions solely by means of the laws of mechanics. And even if one appealed to the basic principle of Cartesian physiology – that is, ‘fire without light’ following the expression from the Traité de l'Homme – as the constitutive element of a larger theory of the living, the following point remained patently clear: ‘Among the various fires of nature that might be called upon to replace the vital soul, Descartes made an unfortunate choice, namely carbonic gas which is a principle of death, and not of life, as modern science has shown’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 175). In the revised version of Du principe vital, Bouillier attempted to pull Descartes towards the position of those physicians responsible for the progressive sidetracking of the soul in the constitution of the science of man, emptying Descartes's doctrine of its spiritualist potential. Bouillier thus literally turned Cousin's project on its head: The interest of Cousin's Descartes became the contrary of what it was for Cousin.
The strategy of excess. In order to be equitable towards the Cartesian project, however, it had to be stressed that Descartes had been forced to harden his arguments in order to fight the pernicious effects of a ruinous kind of animism, coming at much too high a cost for humankind. This ‘overflow of souls, in man and in nature’ was emblematically expressed in the doctrine of Jan Baptist Van Helmont, whose doctrine is judged as follows:
There can be no doubt that this prodigious life of souls and intellectual faculties has contributed, along with the general principles of his metaphysics, to throw Descartes into the opposite exaggeration of mechanical physiology, the absolute negation of life and of all souls except the human ones, thus endorsing the automatism of beasts.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 164)
But this Cartesian excess had an unfortunate effect: while animism was the prevalent system in the history of ideas before Descartes, Cartesianism had left such a powerful imprint on posterity that the very term ‘animism’ could no longer be pronounced without immediately lending to a ‘suspicion of ontology and a return to scholasticism’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 48). What Bouillier had to accomplish next, then, was not so much the redefining of animism, but the refutation of that with which it had generally been identified with in the Cartesian history of ideas, by partisans as well as opponents of those ideas. Descartes, but also Cousin reading Descartes, had contributed to the exaggerations attached to the term ‘animism', but without such exaggeration being strategically ungrounded.
The strategy of appending. In order to balance his project, Bouillier took a final precaution which was strategically very clever: He identified an ally among the Cousinians who had tried to stay in the background: Jean-Philibert Damiron, and in particular his Rapport sur le concours sur la philosophie de Leibniz, published in 1860. It was Damiron who had asked Bouillier to reorient his first work towards Descartes the metaphysician. In his own Essai sur la philosophie en France au XVIIe siècle (1846), he had expressed scruples about Leibniz. These scruples were expressed at the time when Leibniz's philosophy had been chosen as the topic for the essay competition of the Académie. This in itself testified to the actuality current relevance and the importance of the Hanover philosopher. Influenced by the dissertations written by Nourrisson and Foucher de Careil,15 Damiron underlined what, for him, constituted the most pertinent aspect of Leibniz's dynamics, namely the way it reintroduced a notion of force that was neither materialist nor ‘purely’ spiritualist. Leibniz, ‘who does not always tell us all he does or how he does it', had drawn his argumentation from the science of the soul, not from his conception of God or matter (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 48).16 This aspect of Damiron's reading of Leibniz was crucial for Bouillier, but it also helps to clarify the kind of obstacle Bouillier was facing specifically when revising his dissertation on the vital principle. This obstacle concerned not only Cartesianism or animism, but the complex relation between the two theories that stand out when they are refracted in the prism of the institutionally dominant Cartesianism: ‘The false notion of the soul endorsed by Descartes [we must here understand: by Cousin's Descartes]: that is the principal cause for the resistance that animism today encounters in French philosophy’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 319).
Finally, we must consider one of the most important readings of Leibniz at the time, namely the one proposed by Albert Lemoine who read Leibniz through the eyes of Georg Ernst Stahl, a pietist physician who had engaged in an acrid controversy with Leibniz on the question of vitalism and pre-established harmony, subsequently published by Stahl in 1720 under the title Negotium otiosum (‘A Tiresome Quarrel’). Once we understand the interest of Lemoine's text on Stahl for Bouillier, we can better grasp the interpretation and rehabilitation of Leibniz that he proposes as a response to Lemoine without however ever losing sight of Cousin.
In France, Stahl had become central to contemporary philosophico-medical debates, and the way he was read is telling of the confusion that ruled when it came to the meaning of the term ‘animism'. For certain commentators, Stahl had simply replaced Jan Baptist Van Helmont's archeus with the rational soul. For others, he was mainly influenced by Descartes, Malebranche and, more generally, by doctrines about the passivity of matter. Indeed, Stahl's work represented a kind of indeterminate polemical reference that everyone gave a meaning to according to their needs. Probably for this very reason, Stahl was at the heart of the academic debates. Maine de Biran was the first to recognize his importance.17 After him, Stahl was talked about in Paris. Bouillier notes, for example, the influence of the doctoral thesis by Ernest-Charles Lasègue from 1846, De Stahl et de sa doctrine médicale. At the same time, Stahl's work was translated in Montpellier.
The most important vindication of Stahl was, however, proposed by Albert Lemoine, a professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Letters in Bordeaux, in his dissertation Stahl et l'animisme of which the Academy published a summary in July and August 1858. This dissertation was doubly important for Bouillier.18 First, it provided him with the conceptual means to deconstruct the modern, pejorative understanding of animism. Next, it obliged him to revise his own position in the book on Le principe vital, taking into account the objections that Lemoine made to him in a second version of his work, published in 1864 under the title Le Vitalisme et l'animisme de Stahl. 19 The difference between the titles of the two versions of Lemoine's text alone testifies to what was at stake. In the first version, Lemoine's aim was to justify Stahl and revise the meaning of the ‘label’ of animism. In the second version, on the contrary, he wanted to situate himself in relation to animism, and in particular question the relation it upholds to vitalism. These discussions of Stahl thus served to outline the contours of a new animism that Lemoine had contributed to rehabilitate without, however, subscribing to it, but that Bouillier now wanted to see become dominant within institutionalized spiritualism.20
From there on we can distinguish yet another two strategies. First, Bouillier found arguments in favour of animism in Lemoine's dissertation, or rather an alternative way of dissociating animist explanations from the pejorative image that had haunted them since Descartes. Next, he employed and modified those arguments for his own purposes by engaging in a deeper enquiry into Leibniz, in particular on the question of insensible perceptions. Let us take a look at each of these two points.
The importance of Lemoine's dissertation for Bouillier was, first, that it put into focus a kind of double interpretive manoeuvre the effect of which had been to deprive Stahl of all originality: While the Cartesian reception of animism had reduced it to the caricatures of Van Helmont, Parcelsus, Fludd and Boehme, the Leibnizian reception of Stahl had reduced his animism to materialism. Stahl, however, had in reality proposed a true alternative (Lemoine calls it ‘an intermediary system’) to both mechanism and dynamics. His animism could in this sense be considered radically new, in philosophy as well as in physiology. In order to show that, one would however first have to dissociate Stahl from Descartes. More precisely, one had to dissociate him from a dualist and occasionalist Descartes, a Descartes who had championed the passivity of both the soul and the body. This would permit granting the soul – and only the soul – a certain dynamism, by way of juxtaposing Stahl's position to the doctrine of pre-established harmony and its shortcomings, stressed by Bouillier in his 1854 Histoire. Next, Stahl's animism should be rationalized, by being correlated with experimental results and with the struggle against abstract hypotheses. In this context, attributing life to the rational soul became the natural consequence of an unwillingness to multiply secondary and chimerical causes, archeuses and genies of all kinds. In summary, Lemoine incited his readers to revise the ‘labels’ used by the nascent historiography of the life sciences and attempted to liberate the field of animism for this new science.
In chapter VIII of Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, Bouillier analyses the major differences between Stahl's spiritualism and ‘that of Descartes and the psychologists who separate the organic functions from thought and will in order to refer them to another principle’ (Bouillier, Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, chap. VIII, 152). He complemented this analysis with a polemical study of Leibniz. Lemoine had questioned Leibniz's role in the identification of Stahl as a ‘materialist', and thus in the association of Stahl to the ‘thousand-headed’ monster that Cousin was chasing. Lemoine's aim, however, was to show that if Leibniz did indeed attack Stahl, he did not reject him entirely. When attacking Stahl, Leibniz only aimed at exhibiting those doctrinal elements which, in an animism Leibniz otherwise subscribed to, contradicted the theory of pre-established harmony. Moreover, instead of only criticizing the idea according to which the soul directs not only voluntary movement but also the organic functions, Leibniz made the mistake of attacking generally the idea of the interaction between body and soul. He mistakenly took all notions of soul-body interaction – a notion that is not Cartesian if one insists upon making Descartes an occasionalist – to be materialist. At the same time, Leibniz had reinforced the element of passivity in pre-established harmony, hereby compromising the monadology.21 In sum, by insisting on pre-established harmony, Leibniz lost what the monadology had gained him, namely the activity of the soul. Stahl, on the contrary, used that gain and brought out its full potential:
Stahl is indeed a true [ … ] spiritualist, but, reflecting with his common sense along with the rest of the world, he thinks that the spiritual soul is nevertheless capable of moving the body. This is the crime that the author of the pre-established harmony cannot forgive him.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 163)
Hence, according to Lemoine, a well-conceived animism did not give rise to materialism. Quite to the contrary, it had as its condition sine qua non the immateriality of the soul. Stahl ‘brings spiritualism down to the level of medicine, to the advantage of medicine and of philosophy itself’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 187). He went further than Leibniz who remained Cartesian or occasionalist, according to the typology established by Bouillier in his Histoire.
The importance of Lemoine's dissertation for Bouillier's project should now be clear. But Bouillier still had another two problems to deal with. First, he had to displace the main foyer of animism from medicine to the history of philosophy. This required downplaying the element that Lemoine had shown to play an overwhelmingly strong role, namely Cartesian mechanism, which had helped legitimize materialist re-appropriations of Descartes in both medicine and philosophy. But it also involved removing flaws in Stahl's animism. Next, in order to remain at the heart of eclecticism and to make his position acceptable to the dominant psychological spiritualism, he had to make Leibniz triumph over Stahl in the end, or show how Leibniz correctly imported lessons learned from Stahl into philosophy. Let us consider these two points.
Bouillier first explained that by appealing to the soul, insofar as it knows and reasons, when explaining the interplay of the organs, and in particular when establishing all the functions of life, Stahl himself remained too Cartesian. What had to be reused and valued in Leibniz was the theory that explained the unconscious nature of vital phenomena, that is to say, the theory of insensible perceptions, of blind and deaf thoughts.
References to the cases where consciousness breaks down, limit cases such as lethargy, apoplexy or even childhood, had been at the heart of the organicist argument. In his Nouvelles études sur le spiritualisme, for example, Pidoux shows how the theory of insensible perception had been tested at the Académie impériale de médecine where they experimented with induced anaesthesia (by inhalation of ether or chloroform) in order to observe what psychological phenomena occurred before, during, and after the administration of the anaesthetics. Their observations did not permit identifying the brain as the ‘the organ of inner sense’ (which would amount to endorsing materialism). They did however show that anaesthesia suppresses people's will and sense of unity.22 Those experiments suggested that force should be resituated on the side of matter and, most importantly, they showed how the spiritualist re-appropriation of animism by Bouillier was a sleight of hand. For if some force or other did not subsist in those lethargic states, it could not originate from the soul, and consequently animism as conceived by Bouillier was proven wrong.
In relation to the question of consciousness, Bouillier's position thus appears as a veritable tour de force: he mobilizes the same argumentative framework as the one employed by the mechanist Cartesians in the physical register by holding that one cannot explain the infinite variations in the states of consciousness otherwise than by appealing to a domain of insensible perceptions governed by the same laws as the domain of sensible ones. Taking departure in the polemics against Locke's empiricism in the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, Bouillier thus reconceptualizes the Leibnizian minute perceptions from the viewpoint of the physicians, that is, Bouillier's adversaries, according to an argument a fortiori: ‘The metaphysician who underestimates the reality of insensible perceptions is similar to the physician who, when studying material nature, does not take into account imperceptible bodies and insensible movements’ (Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 199). This additional argument permits Bouillier to specify what he himself understands by ‘animism’: it is a doctrine that stresses a form of ‘inner sense'. Leibniz can thus, at the same time, be habilitated and protected against all materialist or even pantheist misuse.
As such, Leibniz constituted the very last mediation needed by Bouillier in order to produce what amounted to a veritable coup de theater, although most of the preparatory work had already been done by Lemoine: Bouillier overturned the Cartesian model, but this time the dominant one. For it was precisely via this internal sense that Bouillier finally rediscovered a ‘good’ Descartes. By means of this good Descartes he completely renewed the analyses of the phenomena of passion he had proposed in the Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, and even those proposed in chapter XII of the dissertation on the vital principle, dedicated to the ‘transformation’ of life in mechanism:
[ … ] modern psychology has much too often forgotten the ancient theory of the inner senses, these senses that the organs do not seem to be exterior to, and that do not require that any external object be actually present. Descartes, however, and not going any further than to him, had noted them in ancient philosophy, and had provided a place for them in his theory of man. Besides the external senses, he allows for two internal senses that he defines in the following way: ‘The first sense that I call interior comprises hunger, thirst and other natural appetites, and it is aroused in the soul by the nerves of the stomach, the gullet and all the other parts that serve the natural functions on account of which one has such appetites. The second comprises joy, sadness, love, anger and all the other passions, etc.’ The reality of this internal sense which according to Descartes is aroused by the movements of the stomach, the gullet and all the other parts that serve the natural functions, has been recognized by a great number of physiologists who, in general, have concerned themselves more than the psychologists with the relations of the soul with the body.
(Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne, 364–5)
When writing this, Bouillier pointed to a whole new field of study that his spiritualist friends had ignored: that of the soul's passions, those passions upon which the morality Cousin had wished for relied. The interpretation of Descartes that Bouillier finally endorsed – at the endpoint of a careful deconstruction of an institutionalized Descartes that had become so influential that no Cartesian alternative was available to critics such as Rochoux – is thus the Descartes we encounter at places in the Traité de l'homme, in the fifth part of the Discours de la méthode, at the end of the fourth part of the Principes de la philosophie, in the correspondence, with Elisabeth in particular, and, above all, in the treatise on the Passions de l’âme. It is a Descartes conceived via a new interpretation of Leibnizianism, saved from the official Cousinianism caricatural conception of its relation to ‘animism’ and ‘Cartesianism'.
What does the example of Bouillier tell us about the reception of Leibniz in France in the mid-nineteenth century? It must first be underlined that this reception remains governed by the available texts and translations, and caught up in the reception of other authors through whom it is mediated (e.g. in the polemics surrounding Stahl). It is thus not Leibniz alone, or just Leibniz, who is received, but a Leibniz inserted into an intellectual constellation outside of which the various ways in which he is used remain perfectly incomprehensible. Second, in the context of the dialogue between spiritualism and the life sciences, we note, at the same time, an increasing interest and very strong distrust with regard to the monadology. In this context, the confrontation of the monadological theses with other theses in the Leibnizian system becomes indicative of the degree of autonomy that an author has with regard to an institutionalized thought within which monadology has no place.
More generally, Bouillier's intellectual itinerary teaches us that any reception of an author or a body of texts will be biased by institutional and mediations the effects of which show up in the way in which their history is told. Whether one chooses to mobilize the Leibniz of the monadology, pre-established harmony or minute perceptions, depends on the strategies that one adopts when entering one's own intellectual space – a space where such references already have several meanings and fulfil precise functions. In other words: interpretations of early modern authors are always refracted in the context of those who read them and they reflect the contemporary issues with which they are concerned, and this has consequences that can be identified and even interpreted in their texts.
Second, the references to an author do not acquire their meaning in and by themselves, but always in relation to references to other authors: Leibniz is interpreted in relation to interpretations of Descartes or Stahl – interpretations of Descartes and Stahl that are coloured by present-day concerns, that select, order, and recompose the doctrinal elements in those authors in ways that serve the dominant cause. Bouillier's work, in short, poses the question of the ‘objectivity’ and the ‘autonomy’ of the historian of philosophy.23
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Antoine-Mahut, Delphine. ‘Metaphysics, Psychology and Physics in the 19th Century French Histories of Philosophy’. In Physics and Metaphysics. Issues and Directions in the Study of Cartesianism and Anti-Cartesianism, edited by S. Roux and D. Antoine-Mahut. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, forthcoming.
Biran, Maine de, Marie François Pierre Gonthier. Examen des leçons de philosophie de M. Laromiguière. Paris: Fournier, 1817.
Biran, Maine de, Marie François Pierre Gonthier. Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz. Paris: L-G. Michaud, 1819.
Bouillier, Francisque. Histoire et critique de la révolution cartésienne. Lyon: L. Boitel, 1842.
Bouillier, Francisque. Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne. 2 tomes. Paris: Durand/Lyon, Brun et Cie, 1854.
Bouillier, Francisque. De l'unité de l’âme pensante et du principe vital. Paris: Auguste Durand/Lyon: Brun et Cie, 1858.
Bouillier, Francisque. Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, ou Examen des diverses doctrines médicales et psychologiques sur les rapports de l’âme et de la vie. Paris: J-B. Baillère et Fils, Londres et Madrid, 1862.
Cotten, Jean-Pierre. ‘Spinoza et Victor Cousin’. In Spinoza au XXe siècle, edited by A. Tosel, P.-F. Moreau and J. Salem, 231–42. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005.
Cousin, Victor. Oeuvres de Descartes, en onze volumes. Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1824/1826.
Cousin, Victor. Cours d'histoire de la philosophie moderne, année 1815–1816. Paris: Ladrange, 1841.
Cousin, Victor. Histoire générale de la philosophie depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à la fin duXVIIIe siècle. Paris: Didier et Cie, 1863.
Damiron, Jean-Philibert. Essai d'histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle. Paris: F. Didot, 1828.
Damiron, Jean-Philibert. Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-septième siècle. Paris: Hachette, 1846.
Foucher de Careil, Louis Alexandre. Réfutation inédite de Spinoza par Leibniz. Précédée d'un mémoire par Louis Alexandre Foucher de Careil. Paris E. Brière, rue Ste Anne 55, 1854.
Foucher de Careil, Louis Alexandre. Leibniz, Descartes et Spinoza. Avec un Rapport par M. V. Cousin. Paris: Ladrange, 1862.
Janet, Paul. ‘Une nouvelle phase de la philosophie spiritualiste’. Revue des deux Mondes 108 (1873): 365–9.
Janicaud, Dominique. Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Une généalogie du spiritualisme français. Paris: J. Vrin, 1997.
Laprade, Richard de. Animisme et vitalisme (Mémoires de l'Académie de Lyon, classe des lettres, 1861).
Latreille, Camille. Francisque Bouillier. Le dernier des cartésiens. Avec des lettres inédites de Victor Cousin. Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1907.
Lemoine, Albert. L'Animisme et le vitalisme de Stahl. Paris: Germain-Baillière, 1864.
Leroux, Pierre. ‘De la mutilation d'un écrit posthume de M. Jouffroy’. Revue indépendante (1er novembre 1842): 257–322.
Macherey, Pierre. ‘Leroux dans la querelle sur le panthéisme’. Cahiers de Fontenay 36–8 (1985): 215–16.
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Moreau, Pierre-François. ‘Saisset lecteur de Spinoza’. Recherches sur le XVIIe siècle 4 (1980): 85–97.
Moreau, Pierre-François. ‘Trois polémiques contre Victor Cousin’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 (1983): 542–8.
Moreau, Pierre-François. ‘Les enjeux de la publication en France des papiers de Leibniz sur Spinoza’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 2 (1988): 215–32.
Nourrisson, Jean-Félix. La Philosophie de Leibniz. Paris: Hachette, 1860.
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Vermeren, Patrice. ‘La philosophie au présent: le juif Spinoza (l'institution philosophique et la doctrine maudite du juif Spinoza)’. Lignes 12 (1990): 167–80.
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1 On this, see Vermeren, Victor Cousin.
2 On spiritualism in nineteenth century France, see Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique.
3 François Joseph Victor Broussais (1772–838) was a student of Bichat and Pinel, head of the Hôpital Val de grâce in Paris, professor at the medical faculty and inspector of public health. He was a member of the Académie de médécine founded in 1823 and of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques from 1832 onwards. He wrote extensively on the relation between the history of philosophy and the history of medicine. He had an influence comparable to Cousin's whom he was constantly challenging in public.
4 On this, see Antoine-Mahut, ‘Cartésianisme dominant et cartésianismes subversifs'.
5 This text is the revised and considerably augmented version (420 pages) of a dissertation of about 60 pages submitted in 1858 titled De l'unité de l’âme pensante et du principe vital.
6 On the return of Maine de Biran's doctrine and of Leibniz's dynamical doctrine on the scene of the French universities from 1840 onward, see Janet, ‘Une nouvelle phase de la philosophie spiritualiste’, 365–9. Janet includes in this movement Jouffroy, Ravaisson, Vacherot and even Saisset. Biran died in 1824. It should be recalled here that Lainé, a close friend of Biran and the executor of his testament, put Cousin in charge of examining and editing the papers he had in his possession. Among these documents, Cousin had the Examen des leçons de philosophie de M. Laromiguière (which had already been published in 1817), the 1819 text on Leibniz (Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz), and the manuscript Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral, a work that had received a prize from the Academy of Copenhagen and the ‘great importance' of which Cousin stressed when publishing it for the first time in 1834 along with the other two texts. Cousin was accused of having deliberately delayed (for more than ten years!) the publication of the papers he had in his possession and of having censured them when he did finally publish them. The affair is recounted in Leroux, ‘De la mutilation d'un écrit posthume de M. Jouffroy', 293. This heavy context weighed upon all attempts at rehabilitating Biran's duo-dynamism, that it is to say, his theory regarding the two sources of vital phenomena: the active I and the unknown vital, animal force.
7 Jean-Philibert Damiron (1794–862) became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1836 and obtained the chair in modern history at the Sorbonne in 1838. Victor Cousin put him in charge of writing up the reports on the dissertations presented at the 1839 competition. Damiron was the author of an Essai d'histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (1828) and an Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-septième siècle (1846). His report on the dissertations on Cartesianism was published in the introduction of the second book.
8 For details regarding the revisions required by Damiron, see Antoine-Mahut, ‘La fabrique de l'histoire du cartésianisme néerlandais dans les histoires de la philosophie française du dix-neuvième siècle' et 3: With regard to Bouillier, Damiron cleverly stresses a proximity between Locke and Descartes, in relation to the theory of the soul's passivity (see Damiron, Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en France au XVIIe siècle, 50–2.)
9 Cousin, Cours d’histoire de la philosophie moderne, 11e Leçon, 88. On the evolution of Cousin's position on pantheism from his first classes from 1815 to their reformulation in the Histoire générale de la philosophie depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1863), see Moreau, ‘Spinoza et Victor Cousin', 327–31; ‘Spinozisme et matérialisme au XXe siècle’, 85–94; ‘Saisset lecteur de Spinoza’, 85–97; ‘Trois polémiques contre Victor Cousin', 542–8; ‘Les enjeux de la publication en France des papiers de Leibniz sur Spinoza', 215–32; Vermeren, ‘La philosophie au présent', 167–80; Macherey, ‘Leroux dans la querelle sur le panthéisme', 215–16; Cotten, ‘Spinoza et Victor Cousin', 231–42.
10 Bouillier develops his general analysis of Leibniz in volume II (chapters 17–19 are explicitly dedicated to Leibniz).
11 Laprade's dissertation was published in Lyon by Aimé Vingtrinier and includes only 16 pages.
12 What Laprade had in mind was probably the unpublished seminars on consciousness from 1819 to 1820. They can be consulted in the manuscript collection of Cousin's writings at the library of the Sorbonne.
13 Regarding the argument from the Paedon, in connection with Stahl, see Bouilllier, Du principe vital et e l’âme pensante, chap. V, 73.
14 The original version of the dissertation even spoke of this as a ‘family quarrel' (see -1858- 5). Hence, corresponding with Cousin brought Bouillier to reconsider or least render more explicit the relation between the ‘family quarrel' and the ‘battle against materialism'.
15 Cousin's ‘verbal report' on this dissertation for the Académie des sciences morales et politiques dates from 1854. It was published in Leibniz, Descartes et Spinoza. Avec un Rapport par M. V. Cousin, an augmented version of Foucher de Careil's, Réfutation inédite de Spinoza par Leibniz. Nourrisson's, La Philosophie de Leibniz was published with a quotation attributed to Cousin on the cover: ‘Leibniz is the last and greatest Cartesian'.
16 Bouillier refers to Leibniz as an ally from very early on, referencing Leibniz's De ipsa vi naturae insita, included in the Erdmann edition: ‘[ … ] the first science of force is not truly mechanics or physics but, as Mr. Damiron has pointed out [in the report for the Académie des sciences morales et politiques regarding the competition on Leibniz's philosophy], but psychology' (De l’unité de l’âme pensante et du principe vital, 5).
17 See Biran, Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz. This text had been written between April and July 1819 and was intended for Michaud's Biographie universelle. Biran describes Stahl's physiology as the key theory that would allow for the alleviation of the indetermination of the Cartesian doctrine of innate knowledge and the reconciliation of Descartes and Locke (see, for example, Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz, 20).
18 Bouillier summarized his debt to Lemoine as follows: ‘I have made use of the excellent analysis of this polemics that Mr. Lemoine has provided in his dissertation on Stahl' (Du principe vital et de l’âme pensante, 204).
19 Lemoine, L'Animisme et le vitalisme de Stahl.
20 Cousin himself called for such a confrontation (see Cousin to Bouillier, 8 November 1858, in Latreille, Francisque Bouillier, 226).
21 For Lemoine's very convoluted argumentation, see Stahl et l'animisme, 147–51.
22 On this point, see Pidoux, Nouvelles études sur le spiritualisme, 17–18.
23 I am grateful to Mike Beaney, Jeremy Dunham, Mogens Laerke, Samuel Lézé, Pauline Phemister and the two anonymous reviewers for their relevant and stimulant comments on the manuscript. This paper was translated by Mogens Laerke.