"Science Cannot Stop With Science": Maurice Blondel and the

Sciences

Adam C. English

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 2, April 2008, pp.
269-292 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2008.0015

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/235869
 ‘‘Science Cannot Stop With Science’’:
Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

Adam C. English

As the nineteenth century steamed into the twentieth, a sense of anxiety

swelled among many philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people about
the extraordinary progress of science. In the fields of evolutionary biology,
paleontology, physics, astronomy, mechanics, and medicine, scientists were
expanding their dominion across all spheres of knowledge. Scientific impe-
rialism loomed as a real threat in the minds of many people, including some
scientists. Prime Minister of England William Gladstone voiced the com-
monly felt anxiety in 1881 when he said, ‘‘Let the scientific men stick to
their sciences and leave philosophy and religion to poets, philosophers and
theologians.’’1 In 1893 Pope Leo XIII issued a similarly toned encyclical,
Providentissimus Deus, ‘‘There can never, indeed, be any real discrepancy
between the theologian and the physicist [or scientist], as long as each con-
fines himself within his own lines.’’2 Leo’s fear that those lines were being
trampled under foot, even as he spoke, was revealed in his admonition: ‘‘to
the Professor of Sacred Scripture a knowledge of natural science will be of
very great assistance in detecting . . . attacks on the Sacred Books, and in

1
Quoted in Brian Silver, The Ascent of Science (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 130.
2
Providentissimus Deus, 18. Accessed online March 4, 2007 at the Vatican online ar-
chives, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xi ii_enc_
18111893_providentissimus-deus_en.html.

Copyright 䉷 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 2 (April 2008)

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2008

refuting them.’’3 In the pope’s view, science was in danger of unchaining

itself and trespassing into areas in which it had no jurisdiction.
The same year as Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus, a certain French-
born, Roman Catholic student of philosophy, Maurice Blondel (1861–
1949) submitted and defended a controversial thesis before the faculty at
the Sorbonne on ‘‘L’Action. Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science
de la pratique’’ or ‘‘Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of
Practice’’ (referred to in this paper as Action [1893]). Facing a packed
gallery and a table of mostly unsympathetic examiners, Blondel’s defense
lasted four grueling hours. In the end, his thesis was reluctantly but unani-
mously accepted for its methodological vigor and its ‘‘noble inspiration.’’
Although he was granted the doctorate, the controversy caused the admin-
istration to refuse him a university teaching post.
The thesis disgruntled and even offended many in the secular French
university system because of the way it integrated concrete action, philo-
sophical thought, religious experience, and scientific knowledge in a unified
discourse. It crossed the lines that had become the obsession of the late
nineteenth century between religion and science, philosophy and theology,
ideas and actions. Blondel trespassed into science with the tools of philoso-
phy and the spirit of religion. And yet, Blondel’s purpose was not to shame
science into submission to philosophy or faith. What the examiners at the
Sorbonne finally had to admit was that Blondel was not proposing a simple
either-or situation—either science or philosophy, reason or faith, ideas or
actions—in which case he could have been dismissed out of hand; Blondel
was attempting to hold the two sides together in a synthesis, a new philoso-
phy of action that was equally scientific and metaphysical. He wanted to
integrate the full range of disciplines into the mix of action. He aimed ‘‘to
examine to what indirect and tacit borrowings each one of [the disciplines]
owes its existence and its progress, [and] how finally a mediation is neces-
sary’’ between them.4
The source of Blondel’s inspiration for this new synthesis was Émile
Boutroux (1845–1921), with whom he came into contact upon his arrival
as a twenty year old student at the École normale supérieure in August
1881 (unfortunately also the same year Bergson graduated and left the
school, so the two never met there). Blondel credits his teacher and mentor
Boutroux as being the principal guide to appreciating and interpreting the

3
Ibid.
4
Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice,
trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), 65.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

sciences.5 More than simply introducing the natural sciences, Boutroux

taught and modeled how to integrate the sciences and the humanities. Bou-
troux himself was appalled that at the École normale supérieure the sci-
ences and the humanities were completely cordoned off from each other
and he worked diligently to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and coopera-
tion similar to that enjoyed by the German universities.6 He instilled in
Blondel a high regard for interdisciplinary exchange and convinced him
that science could not be effectively understood ‘‘from outside’’ but rather
that it must be engaged ‘‘at least initially’’ from within.7 Blondel so ab-
sorbed this lesson that he adopted a rigorously interdisciplinary methodol-
ogy and outlook. Philosophy for him was always a science just as science
was always a philosophy. As the subtitle of Action (1893) indicates, his
philosophy of action was a ‘‘science of practice.’’
In Boutroux’s magnum opus, De la contingence des lois de la nature
(1874), the argument is made that nothing in nature is ‘‘absolutely neces-
sary’’ and final, including the laws of nature. Despite the empirical and
imperial ring heard in the phrase, ‘‘the laws of nature,’’ they are contin-
gent.8 With new discoveries and new theories, laws of nature can be and
have been revisited, revised, and redescribed. Thomas Kuhn would later
articulate the phenomena of outdating and updating the laws of nature in
terms of paradigm shifts. Not only does human knowledge about nature
adjust and improve, nature itself changes. Nature is not a fixed object to be
isolated under the microscope; it evolves, decays, ruptures, and mends,
often in cycles but sometimes by surprising leaps or alterations. Natural
laws are not nature’s necessity, but provisional tools for human investiga-
tors. They are subject equally to scientific advancement and environmental
or material change.

5
Maurice Blondel, Notes philosophiques 3: 209, cited in Michael Conway, The Science
of Life: Maurice Blondel’s Philosophy of Action and the Scientific Method (New York:
Peter Lang, 2000), 121.
6
Conway, The Science of Life, 116.
7
Ibid., 120.
8
Boutroux opens his work with these lines, ‘‘At his first appearance on this globe, man is
wholly engrossed in the sensations of pleasure or pain that come to him; he does not
think of the outer world, does not even know of its existence. In time, however, through
these very sensations, he distinguishes two elements: the one, relatively simple and uni-
form, is the sense of the self; the other, more complex and changing, is the representation
of extraneous objects.’’ Émile Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, trans.
Fred Rothwell (Chicago: Open Court, 1920), 1. Boutroux’s argument from this observa-
tion is that, insofar as the laws of nature are also ‘‘representations of extraneous objects’’
observed and interpreted by the individual self—a self which is always ephemeral, fallible,
and biased—then those laws are conditional.

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Boutroux submitted De la contingence des lois de la nature together

with his Latin thesis to the Sorbonne in 1874, much as Blondel would do
some nineteen years later, in defiance of the prevailing attitudes in the
French academy on science, philosophy, and religion.9 Whereas the acad-
emy held to a rigid separation of the disciplines, especially with regards to
the sciences and humanities, Boutroux intended to undermine such divi-
sions. His thesis on the contingency of the laws of nature sought to create
a common ground of conversation between the sciences and among the
disciplines. By relativizing the natural laws he relativized the hard sciences
and showed that they were not ultimate. Their truths were not of ‘‘absolute
necessity’’ but contingent and revisable, like those of psychology, politics,
history, religion, and philosophy.
Blondel’s first published article, ‘‘Une association inséparable: l’agran-
dissement des astres à l’horizon,’’ studied the way stars on the horizon are
perceived and misperceived.10 Published in 1888, it exemplified and ex-
tended Boutroux’s thesis. Blondel observed in the article that empirically
tested, scientific observations of stars can be skewed not only by human
error but by the horizon itself—a phenomenon that Albert Einstein would,
within thirty years, account for by redescribing the laws of light, gravita-
tion, and relativity. Photographs taken by a British astronomical expedition
in 1919 off the coast of Africa of a solar eclipse demonstrated that light
was affected by gravitational pull and in this sense acted like any other
mass, just as Einstein had predicted. Einstein’s redescriptions proved true
in other important ways, but Blondel did not have those theories in 1888.
Even so, Blondel knew that the natural laws of his times with regards to
stars, light, and horizons could not be reconciled with observed reality. He
was confident that those laws would be overturned one day. Science and its
laws were, like all other disciplines, contingent.
Blondel’s Action (1893) continued the trajectory mapped out by Bou-
troux. Blondel launched the Sorbonne thesis with a case against ‘‘the inco-
herence of the positive sciences,’’ not for the purpose of discrediting science
but in order to do away with ‘‘the superstition of Science’’ and the privileg-
ing of the scientist above everyone else, ‘‘as if the scientist knew more about
the secret of life than the least of the humble.’’11 He goes on to say, ‘‘No
matter what we do, we shall never live only by scientific ideas.’’12 Again,
9
Conway, Science of Life, 121.
10
Maurice Blondel, ‘‘Une association inséparable: l’agrandissement des astres à l’hori-
zon,’’ Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 26 (1888), 489–97.
11
Blondel, Action (1893), 92 (emphasis his).
12
Ibid.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

Blondel did not wish to undermine but to subjectify science so as to inte-

grate it with life.13 ‘‘The positive sciences are not sufficient for us, because
they are not self-sufficient.’’14 They are useful and sometimes necessary—
throughout Action (1893) many points are illustrated with examples from
chemistry, biology, and mathematics—but the sciences alone are not self-
sufficient.
Scientific information must always be interpreted and assimilated.
How that process occurs constitutes the essence of Blondel’s concerns. In
order that science be given no more or less than its due respect and atten-
tion, Blondel recommended not simply a new process of interpretation and
assimilation, but a new definition of science. Two questions emerge as de-
terminative for the remainder of this essay. How was ‘‘science’’ defined at
the turn of the twentieth century? How did Blondel confirm and contest
that definition?

ARCHAEOLOGY OF SCIENCE

In contemporary culture the term ‘‘science’’ seems to have a disembodied

aura of finality, such that one might say, ‘‘science has shown that . . .’’ or
‘‘science proves that . . .’’ Its unassailable authority arises from the popular
perception of science as a matter of precision and exactitude, of white coats,
test-tubes and scrubbed down laboratories.15 This leads Raymond Williams
to comment that ‘‘Science may now appear to be a very simple word.’’16
And once the simple word of science is spoken, the issue can be laid to rest.
Up until the late nineteenth century, the word ‘‘science’’ carried its
weight of authority differently. The term enjoyed a much wider range and
flexibility, but by the time of Blondel, much of this flexibility and variety
had disappeared. Science was taking on its modern, rigid, and monolithic
demeanor of finality. This did not go unnoticed or unchallenged. Much of
Blondel’s work on science centered on these changes.
The Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, assembled by
André Lalande (1867–1963) in conjunction with members of the Société
française de philosophie from 1902 to 1926, presents itself as a key puzzle-

13
Ibid., 56.
14
Ibid., 65.
15
Christopher Toumey, Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in
American Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 1–6.
16
Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana Press, 1976, 1988), 276. Also see
Charles A. Taylor, Defining Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

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piece in reconstructing the idea of science at the turn of the century. Al-
though published in 1926, more than thirty years after Action, it broadly
represents the philosophical mood of Blondel and his generation on a num-
ber of topics. Lalande proposed the idea of the Vocabulaire to the first
International Congress for Philosophy, held in 1900 in Paris, with none
other than Boutroux presiding as its president. Lalande’s proposal meshed
well with Boutroux’s agenda, for in essence ‘‘the principle reason for having
the Congress was the need to establish a critical dialogue with the natural
sciences.’’17 Lalande’s vocabulary project, which he had been calling for
over the past two years, was successfully born at the International Congress
because of the spirit of interdisciplinary collegiality articulated there by
Boutroux.
Furthermore, Boutroux asked Blondel to give a presentation and made
a point of acknowledging Blondel and his philosophical contributions be-
fore the Congress. In his final speech, Boutroux presented Blondel as a
model for how to relate science and philosophy. Not surprisingly, Blondel
immediately began working in close association with Lalande on the proj-
ect. Over the next twenty years, he contributed commentary, research, and
editorial help on a variety of terms like ‘‘Action,’’ ‘‘Cartesianism,’’ ‘‘Knowl-
edge,’’ ‘‘Belief,’’ ‘‘Transnatural,’’ and even ‘‘Science.’’ Clearly this project
ranked high in Blondel’s mind. Launched with the blessing of his mentor
and deeply indebted to his contributions, the Vocabulaire technique et cri-
tique de la philosophie not only represented the philosophic spirit of the
day, it embodied the kind of interdisciplinary discussion and interaction
envisioned by Blondel.
Coming to the issue at hand, the definition of science, we find that the
Vocabularie offers five.18 These can be summarized as follows: science is (1)
a synonym for knowing, savoir; (2) more specifically, an intentional and
orderly search for ‘‘clear and true knowledge’’; (3) technical ability or
knowledge of a craft or trade; (4) the organization of knowledge into a
synthetic, global body; (5) and finally, science can be defined as ‘‘mathemat-
ics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the sciences specified as ‘natural.’ ’’19
The final definition of the word highlights the distinction between the
‘‘hard’’ and the ‘‘soft’’ sciences, or between science and the humanities.
The five-fold definition of science is significant because it incorporates

17
Conway, Science of Life, 181.
18
André Lalande, et al., ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie,
ed. André Lalande (Paris: Alcan, 1926), 2: 735–40.
19
Ibid., 736.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

the broad range of meanings that the term had accrued over time. For the
contributors to the Vocabulaire technique et critique, the progression of the
five definitions corresponds to the historical development of the discipline.
The historical path of the term ‘‘science’’ is long and winding. In its pre-
Socratic, Socratic, and even Platonic appearances, the word was used very
generically as a synonym for knowledge.20 As the first definition listed in
the Vocabulaire indicates, it sometimes implied techne, and other times
episteme. Sometimes it referred to the method of knowing, and sometimes
it refers to what is known.
The early Greeks were vague about how science differed from knowl-
edge, or even if there was a difference. But Aristotle attempted to reign in
the wide variety of usages—thus introducing the second Vocabulaire defi-
nition—by suggesting that science concerned only clear and true knowl-
edge. Science differed from knowledge because science was the intentional
and orderly search for knowledge. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with
the memorable truism that ‘‘All human beings by nature desire to know.’’21
He went on to differentiate how we come to know things: first by sense-
experience, then by craft, and then by science. Science was the highest, and
most theoretical form of knowing. Aristotle committed himself to the
search for clear and true knowledge in all fields—poetics, ethics, politics,
physics, metaphysics, etc. For him, these were all sciences because they
could all be clearly known, classified, and explained.
According to Lalande, a significant shift occurred during the Middle
Ages, resulting in a third definition of science.22 The shift was towards the
role of a divine originator and source of knowledge, the divine Knower:
God. In its proper medieval sense, ‘‘science’’ designated ‘‘the knowledge
that God has of the world.’’23 The well-known second article of Thomas
Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae proposed that ‘‘Sacred doctrine is a sci-
ence.’’24 Thomas distinguished between sciences that ‘‘proceed from princi-
ples known by the natural light of the intellect’’ and those that proceed ‘‘by

20
For more on the Greek initiatives in science and how they connect to the larger heritage
of science, see David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Tradi-
tion in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
21
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.1.
22
For a much more comprehensive account of science in the Middle Ages, see Edward
Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institu-
tional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
23
Lalande et al., ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabularie, 736.
24
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.2.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2008

the light of a higher science.’’25 God’s knowledge is scientific in the sense

that it is a concrete knowledge of actualities, not an abstract knowledge of
possibilities or potentialities. God has a material knowledge of the world,
like an inventor or skilled handyman whose craft or trade is the universe.
The God of St. Thomas, according to Catherine Pickstock, ‘‘is much more
of a country bumpkin capable of a brutal direct unreflective intuition of
cloddish earth, bleared and smeared with toil. For God’s mind, although
immaterial, is mysteriously commensurate with matter, since God creates
matter.’’26 This is the God of pure action, total actualization, actus purus.
The twelfth-century Islamic philosopher, Ibn Rushd, explained what
was at stake. Human knowledge can always point to a cause (I know some-
thing because I read it, I heard about it, I saw it . . . ). Something happens,
and then humans perceive and know it. But, God’s knowledge is not like
that; God’s knowledge is not caused but causes. Ibn Rushd said, ‘‘the exis-
tence of beings is a cause and reason for our knowledge, while the eternal
Knowledge is a cause and reason for beings.’’27 God does not entertain a
whole range of hypothetical outcomes, one of which is the real outcome;
when God speaks, reality happens. God’s knowledge never fails to actual-
ize. The implication for human sciences is that certainty of human knowl-
edge is achieved by participation in God’s knowledge of the world.
Hypothetical, fallible human science must seek to align itself with the actual
and unfailing divine science.
Given the discussion above, Lalande clearly had in mind the medieval
understanding in the third definition of science found in the Vocabulaire
technique et critique de la philosophie. It addresses ‘‘technical ability’’ and
more specifically ‘‘knowledge of a craft or trade [connaissance du mé-
tier].’’28 This understanding of science dissolved quickly in the sixteenth
century when knowledge of possible outcomes and counterfactuals be-
comes part of scientific knowledge. The Spanish Jesuit, Luis de Molina,
born in 1535, highlighted the shift away from the medieval vision of God
as actus purus and human science as technical and material with his doc-
trine of scientia media, ‘‘middle knowledge’’ (a term which is credited to

25
Ibid.
26
Catherine Pickstock, ‘‘Radical Orthodoxy and the Mediations of Time,’’ Radical Or-
thodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry, ed. Laurence Hemming (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), 72.
Also see John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (New York: Routledge,
2001).
27
Ibn Rushd, ‘‘On God’s Knowledge,’’ in Readings in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Andrew
Schoedinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 212.
28
Lalande et al., ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire, 735.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

him). Middle knowledge is hypothetical knowledge falling in between what

God knows exists or will exist and what God knows does not exist nor will
exist. Middle knowledge is counterfactual (what would have happened if
. . . ) and hypothetical (what might happen if . . . ). Although God may have
foreknowledge of what humans will choose to do, neither God’s knowledge
nor God’s actions automatically determine the choice. Even though God
may influence circumstances, humans can always do otherwise. That is
where scientia media becomes of service.
The philosophical and theological arguments connected with middle
knowledge, free will, and divine sovereignty do not concern this essay.
What should be noticed is how science and knowledge are no longer coun-
tenanced as artful abilities. The drift is toward knowledge understood as a
body of information, both hypothetical and real, and science as the collec-
tion and classification of that information. Hence the Vocabulaire’s fourth
definition of science is the organization of knowledge into a synthetic,
global body.
During the early modern era, which parallels the fourth definition of
science, science connoted not so much a way of knowing as a body of infor-
mation.29 The scientist assumed an organizational task. According to the
Vocabulaire technique et critique, Immanuel Kant, perched at the pinnacle
of the Enlightenment and early modernity, ‘‘defines science in general as
being every doctrine that forms a system, that is to say every set of knowl-
edge ordered according to principles.’’30 Science in the Enlightened mind
referred to the systematic organization of knowledge and branches of
knowledge. As a result of this new understanding, science was elevated to
the status of an independent discipline to be pursued for its own sake and
its own advancement. It ceased to be a tool for other disciplines and became
a discipline unto itself. Increasingly, university faculties were divided into
‘‘the sciences’’ and ‘‘the humanities’’ and undergraduate degrees into Bach-
elor of Arts and Bachelor of Science.
In the fifth stage, representing the full-blown modernity of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, the rift between the scientific disciplines and
the nonscientific ones became rigid and permanent.31 As a sign of the sepa-
ration, people began to identify themselves or others as ‘‘scientists,’’ a term

29
Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions,
1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 168–70.
30
Lalande et al., ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire, 737.
31
Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 12–18.

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not coined until the 1830s.32 This fissure was not only noted by the Vocabu-
laire, but by many other thinkers of that era, including Emmanuel Joyau
(1850–?), who in the same year as Blondel’s Action (1893) published a
work on the political, juridical, philosophical, and social outcomes of the
French revolution which explicitly identifies the ruptures in the disci-
plines.33 Likewise, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) discussed the shift in a
1934 lecture series that traced the development of scientific knowledge
along similar lines as the Vocabulaire’s five stages.34 Other names could be
mentioned, but the point is that science had become for all practical pur-
poses limited to that which can be empirically observed and verified, such
as chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, and engineering. Art, music,
poetry, philosophy, and literature did not meet the requirements of the new
scientific method. The sciences and the nonsciences were conceived as
‘‘non-overlapping magisteria,’’ to employ Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase.35 As
independent realms that neither share the same vocabulary nor appeal to
the same principles, these discretely circumscribed fields were seen to have
no authority outside their prescribed jurisdiction and no right to infringe
upon any other field of thought.
André Lalande added an editorial comment at this point in the Vocabu-
laire’s entry on ‘‘Science.’’ He registered his vociferous objection to this fifth
definition and the modern development of science on the grounds that rigid
compartmentalization of disciplines and knowledge simply does not reflect
reality. His sharply worded comment reads: ‘‘This opposition [between the
humanities and the sciences], which constitutes in France the organization
of the Faculties, does not appear to be founded on theoretically justifiable
reasons.’’ He then proceeded to cite Couturat saying, ‘‘The absurd and de-
plorable schism between the letters and the sciences not only compromises
the future of philosophy, it distorts its history and renders its past unintelli-
gible.’’36 In addition to his criticism of compartmentalization, Lalande com-
plained about the perception of science as value neutral. He objected to the
coy idea that ‘‘the sciences ‘do not suppose to promote a telos or value

32
John Hedley Brooke, ‘‘Science, Religion, and Historical Complexity,’’ Historically
Speaking 8 (2007): 10.
33
Emmanuel Joyau, La philosophie en France pendant la révolution (1789–1795): Son
influence sur les institutions politiques et juridiques (Paris: Arthur Rouseau, 1893), 93–
121, 226–49.
34
Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Geoffrey Bless,
1940), 3–33.
35
Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (New York: Ballantine Publishing, 1999).
36
Lalande et al., ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire, 736.

278
 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

judgments.’ ’’ According to Lalande, ‘‘it can be said in a certain sense that

every science is an ultimate system [un système finaliste] and is composed
of value judgments.’’37 When science makes itself into a final end and a
source of values, it has far overstepped its boundaries.
Although Blondel agreed with Lalande’s assessment of the modern sit-
uation, as did the majority of the French philosophers of his generation, his
critique took a different route from Lalande’s. In the same article on ‘‘Sci-
ence’’ in the Vocabulaire technique et critique, Lalande included a key state-
ment written by Blondel. In a brief but dense and convoluted passage,
Blondel observed three essential characteristics that have come to dominate
modern scientific knowledge:

1. Specification (independent of all ontological consideration) ac-

cording to a particular form—that is to say, according to a point
of view or method of this or that science—for the different sci-
ences, not according to the diversity of objects, but according to
the manner of envisioning, under a pre-determined aspect, the
total problem: heterogeneity and growing solidarity; 2. systematic
organization of ideas or of facts whose scientific being is consti-
tuted by ordered relations, beginning with basic signs and increas-
ing in complexity to the degree that this organized and progressive
language is adopted to the phenomena. Systematic organization
makes the phenomena intelligible so that events can be predicted
and manipulated; 3. evidentiary rigor such that, while vulgar and
practical knowledge tends to admit as true what is not recognized
to be false, it has become the case that ‘the Scientist is a doubter’
[le Savant est un douteur] who quarantines all that is not proven
true.38

These three characteristics represent what excited and what troubled

Blondel about science at the turn of the century. In these three points both
his hopes and his fears are realized. Each characteristic presents promise
and peril; each contains something Blondel admired and something he dis-
liked. That is to say, Blondel viewed these three characteristics as virtues of
early twentieth-century science, that, when taken to the extreme or in ex-
cess, become vices. Because they are posed in such a truncated manner, each
needs to be explained.

37
Lalande, footnote to ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire, 740.
38
Blondel, footnote to ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire, 738.

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THE ENCYCLOPEDIC SPIRIT AND REDUCTIONISM

The first characteristic of modern science that Blondel observes involves the
tendency toward ‘‘specification . . . according to a point of view or method
of this or that science.’’ Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sci-
ences were consumed with identifying and classifying natural phenomena.
The German biologist Ernst Haeckel stands out as an exemplar of this new
encyclopedic mood; he named thousands of new species, mapped them on
a genealogical tree that accounted for all life, and introduced new terms
for classification like ‘‘phylum,’’ ‘‘ecology,’’ and ‘‘phylogeny.’’ The Russian
chemist Dmitri Mendeleev set chemistry on its own path to discovery and
taxonomy when he introduced the periodic table of elements in 1869.
Many other names could be mentioned in the fields of geology, astronomy,
and physics of individuals who caught the new spirit of organization.
As fields of science diversified and data charts multiplied, there arose a
concern for the unity of all knowledge. Knowledge from the various fields
could be correlated if the fields could be arranged in a systematic way. The
predilection for collecting and stratifying fields of information is what Alas-
dair MacIntyre calls the ‘‘encyclopaedic’’ disposition of modern science.39
If all fields of knowledge can be classified and categorized, then some sem-
blance of an encyclopedic or total knowledge might be achieved. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, German universities still held courses
of lectures on Encyclopädie, legitimately assuming that a survey of com-
plete knowledge could be communicated in a single course of study.
Throughout the nineteenth century Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the En-
cyclopædia Britannica enjoyed large-scale popularity. In fact, Diderot’s
work was revised and expanded by the French publisher Charles J. Panck-
oucke and his daughter into the mammoth 206-volume Encyclopédie méth-
odique par ordre des matières between the years 1782 and 1832, a feat
which required 2,250 contributors and a thousand production workers.
Not to be out-done, the French priest and publisher of patristic texts, Jac-
ques Paul Migne produced for direct subscription 171 volumes of a new
Encyclopédie théologique, first appearing in the mid 1840s. During the
years 1893 to1895 the important Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, also
published an Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology. Taking a broader theme,
the Frenchman André-Marie Ampère published a classic ‘‘analytic exposi-
tion of a natural classification of all human knowledge,’’ entitled Essai sur

39
Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Genealogy, Encyclopae-
dia, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

la philosophie des sciences, which proved to be a direct influence on

Blondel.40 It is no wonder that Auguste Comte, writing in the first half of
the nineteenth century, was able to observe in his lifetime an ‘‘encyclopedic
law’’ at work on a universal scale.
The goal of encyclopedism was not necessarily to create a hierarchical
arrangement of all knowledge, in which all knowledge would be judged
according to its value in the hierarchy. It aimed instead at a comprehensive
understanding of all fields of knowledge. Blondel appreciated and encour-
aged the nineteenth-century encyclopedic spirit, as can be testified by his
involvement with Lalande in producing a complete vocabulary of philoso-
phy. Even his study of Action (1893) assumed an encyclopedic task, encom-
passing everything from the origin to the end of human action, including
physiology, individual psychology, family, country, humanity, and the tran-
scendence of action. His was an exciting era in which it was possible to link
all disciplines in a total picture of knowledge.
While Blondel modeled and promoted the scientific pledge to gather,
examine, and classify observational information, he also perceived that not
all forms of encyclopedism allowed for plurality and diversity; some were
disturbingly reductionistic. To return to the original quotation from
Blondel in the Vocabulaire, the problem is not with the ‘‘specification’’ of
forms, trends, observations, etc., but with the specification ‘‘not according
to the diversity of objects, but according to the manner of envisioning,
under a pre-determined aspect, the total problem.’’ In the attempt to dis-
cover, describe, and categorize knowledge about the natural world and
human society, a number of scholars in Blondel’s era fell prey to the tempta-
tion to reduce the manifold varieties of knowledge, data, and disciplines
into simple and convincing explanations, as with the case of the German
materialist, Ludwig Büchner.41 According to Blondel, the reductionist posi-
tion goes as follows: ‘‘the universal system and each particular synthesis is
nothing more than an elementary relation and an order of the constitutive

40
André-Marie Ampère, Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, ou Exposition analytique
d’une classification naturelle de toutes les connaissances humaines, 2 vols. (Paris: Bache-
lier, 1843). Blondel gained some of his first insights into the classification of the sciences
through this work. Ampère, a physicist and a Catholic, modeled for Blondel how philoso-
phy and religion could be considered themselves sciences and be integrated into a scien-
tific account of knowledge.
41
It is significant that Blondel owned a number of Büchner’s works in their French trans-
lations like Science et Nature: essais de philosophie de science naturelle, 2 vols., trans.
Augustin Delondre (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1866), and L’homme selon la science. Son
passée, son présent, son avenir ou d’où venons-nous, qui sommes-nous, où allons-nous?
4th ed. (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1885).

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2008

parts; any problem can be reduced by analysis to what is simple, without

any need for looking at the intrinsic organization itself of the composite.’’42
The danger of concentrating on the individual parts alone is that the whole
becomes explainable by the parts alone.
A number of important nineteenth- and early twentieth-century think-
ers rose to the reductionist challenge, especially in defense of the mystery,
dignity, and sanctity of human life. The influential French naturalist,
Georges Cuvier, argued that living beings cannot be defined as simply the
sum of their parts; an activating force or spirit infuses and enlivens physical
and chemical properties and adapts living organisms to their environs.
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued for this kind of vitalism with greater
success than Cuvier. Indeed, Bergson, who was awarded the Nobel Prize
for literature in 1928, voiced dissatisfaction with reductionistic views of
evolution in his 1907 L’Évolution créatrice. He refuted the notion that evo-
lution was nothing more than mindless material and mechanical forces col-
liding and combining to somehow produce highly complex organisms. An
organ as intricate as the eye of a vertebrate must surely be more than the
result of random variation through natural selection. This is not to say that
Bergson opposed the theory of evolution; he supported it but suggested that
the evolutionary process was not random and purposeless. Something like
a ‘‘vital impulse’’ channeled and directed the development of life.43
Blondel approached the subject in a similar way. He was opposed to
many versions of evolutionism then current in the late nineteenth century.
He declared in his Action (1893), ‘‘Transformism is an alchemy of na-
ture.’’44 He still referred to evolution as ‘‘transformism,’’ a term which con-
jured up the specter of Lamarck, yet, his critiques were not limited to the
Lamarckians. He was disturbed by the way in which ‘‘the transformist is
persuaded he will discover the progression of the rudimentary beginnings
of life toward the higher forms and toward humanity.’’45 Like an alchemist
who takes ordinary materials and tries to change them into something more
valuable, the evolutionary biologist too easily presumes that simple life
moves in succinct stages toward an ultimate goal. When asked about his
analogy with alchemy during his official defense or soutenance of his thesis,
Blondel admitted that the analogy could easily be pushed too far. He said

42
Action (1893), 67.
43
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and
Co., 1911).
44
Action (1893), 79.
45
Ibid., 80.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

that there is merit in studying the origins and developments of life because,
‘‘the conditions in which the chemical and physical phenomena are pro-
duced have not always been the same.’’46 Yet, he also said that science must
beware of confusing the real distinction between the biological and meta-
physical views of origins.
Setting these concerns aside, it should be said that Blondel did not com-
pletely discount the theory of evolution. While he was critical of its philo-
sophical manifestations, Blondel held out the possibility of biological
evolution. The notion that inherited traits change from generation to gener-
ation was not in itself a religious or metaphysical statement, and so could
be agreed upon by materialists or Christians. For Blondel, genetic transfor-
mations over time could be viewed as the never-ending work of God in
creation. In the first volume of La Pensée, he stated, ‘‘It is not the transfor-
mations that [living creatures] themselves produce; they emerge in what the
ancients profoundly called ‘seminal reason’ . . . There is, in effect, a germ
of living spirituality that is deposited in the inmost nature of things.’’47 Liv-
ing things are not self-generating nor are they solely the product of random
chance, they are imbued with a ‘‘germ of living spirituality,’’ or what Berg-
son would have called a ‘‘vital impulse.’’ Blondel stoutly resisted any at-
tempt to reduce the question of origins to biological cause and effect.

STANDARDIZATION AND DETERMINISM

The first characteristic of early twentieth-century science to convert all

knowledge into encyclopedic parts was matched by a need to accumulate
and order those parts. Blondel said that a second characteristic of modern
science is its penchant for ‘‘systematic organization of ideas or of facts
whose scientific being is constituted by ordered relations.’’ Each piece of
new knowledge must be put in relation to all other knowledge so that the
effect of one on the other might be observed and measured. Of course, such
an admirable ambition required the standardization of measurements.
Many new departments of mathematics came into existence in the
nineteenth century, which resulted in an explosion of progress in the field.
New theories of numbers, trigonometry, functions, and forms proved the
need for the discipline. Advances in the analytic fields of study also resulted

46
Maurice Blondel, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Troisfontaines (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 1995), 1: 720.
47
Blondel, La Pensée (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 1: 311.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2008

in the standardization of weights and measurements. A report on the deci-

mal system was presented to the French National Assembly in 1791 and
was made compulsory by 1820. Jöns Jakob Berzelius, a Swedish chemist,
introduced a new, logical format for ordering chemical symbols based on
the hydrogen atom. Two German mathematical physicists, C. F. Gauss and
W. E. Weber, invented the system of magnetic and electric units. Their orga-
nization was based not in terms of quantities, but on fundamental unities
of length, mass, and time. Likewise, Joules standardized the measurement
of heat.48
Blondel applauded these advances in knowledge and organization.
Standardization was necessary for scientific progress. And yet, Blondel
raised a note of concern: ‘‘Systematic organization makes the phenomena
intelligible so that events can be predicted and manipulated.’’49 Standard-
ization in late nineteenth century science occurred primarily for the purpose
of predicting and controlling phenomenal patterns. Regimented collection
of information was needed so that forecasts could be made and outcomes
adjusted. What concerned Blondel with regards to this development was
the temptation of determinism. If all information about this world is in
theory accessible, and if it really does work according to rigid natural laws,
then a Laplacean determinism might seem within reach. With a big enough
calculation machine, the nineteenth-century mathematician Pierre-Simon
de Laplace speculated that he could predict the outcome of any event. While
it might be advantageous to retain the language of moral freedom and re-
sponsibility, everything could be determined in advance from a scientific
viewpoint. Life, from a deterministic point of view, becomes simply the
actualization of a predictable series of cause and effect. ‘‘What could be
more beautiful and more solid,’’ Blondel confessed, ‘‘than this triumphant
construction of a science able to erect a universe and to imprison the world,
all possible worlds, in its formulas! But it is only a spell to be broken.’’50
Only the misappropriation of mathematics could lead to the arrogance
of determinism. Only the reduction of existence by means of a totalizing
calculus (as opposed to an infinite calculus) could verify Laplacean deter-
minism. According to such a position, ‘‘action is an integration whose rig-
orous formula a perfect calculus would provide.’’ If one conceives of action
as a matter of cause and effect, motion and matter, then hypothetically it

48
See William C. Dampier, A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy and
Religion, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 202–27.
49
Blondel, ‘‘Science,’’ Vocabulaire, 738.
50
Blondel, Action (1893), 70.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

could be predicted according to mathematical formulas. But, action is ‘‘a

sui generis fact, whose originality no mathematical approximation reveals
and which, like every other synthesis, can be known only by direct observa-
tion.’’51 In other words, real action is unpredictable, spontaneous, and in-
ternally initiated. Although there may be external causalities to consider
and behavioral patterns to recognize, human action is freely willed and
internally generated such that it cannot be reduced to a Laplacean formula.
Indeed, the very nature and practice of mathematics itself reveals the inepti-
tude and impotence of standardized determinism. ‘‘The world, as the prog-
ress of mathematics leads us to understand it, is not a closed system; it is
unlimited.’’52

EVIDENTIARY RIGOR AND PHENOMENISM

Besides encyclopedism and standardization, the third characteristic of early

twentieth-century modern science discussed by Blondel is: ‘‘evidentiary
rigor such that, while vulgar and practical knowledge tends to admit as true
what is not recognized to be false, it has become the case that ‘the Scientist
is a doubter’ who quarantines all that is not proven true.’’ Modern science
demanded ‘‘evidentiary rigor,’’ empirical and verifiable evidence. Observ-
able and repeatable evidence is not an option for the conscientious scientist,
it is a must. In order for the standardization of measurements and the sys-
temization of knowledge to be of value, they must rest on data that is sure
and true. Steps were taken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to ensure the quality of scientific evidence. Without verifiable evidence and
observation, everything else was a waste.
Blondel commended the new standards for evidence and the vigor with
which scientists strained their evidence. As Blondel indicated, the savant
[knower, scientist, or scholar] prides himself in his abilities to doubt every-
thing until it has been proven. This could be both a blessing and a curse,
both a commitment to excellence and an act of arrogance. Blondel was
concerned that, in pride, the savant might fancy that all that can be known
about the world and life can and must be known through observation and
experimentation and what is not demonstrated through such methods
should be held in suspicion. ‘‘Oh Science, where thou art, all other interests

51
Ibid., 64.
52
Ibid., 69.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2008

fade and vanish away!’’53 Although the call for rigorous evidence was laud-
able and even necessary, it tended to foster a type of proud naiveté that
Blondel called ‘‘phenomenist realism.’’54
‘‘Phenomenist realism’’ describes the position of those who valued sci-
entific observations to the exclusion of other kinds of observations. In the
name of realism, such persons would limit all metaphysical speculation
about God, the soul, prayer, love, beauty, etc., to only naturally perceivable
phenomena. Metaphysical claims could not be tolerated beyond what has
been scientifically established. Such realism, according to Blondel, was nei-
ther objective nor neutral, but ‘‘phenomenist,’’ which is to say, committed
to certain presuppositions about which phenomena can show up to obser-
vation.
Under the auspices of ‘‘evidentiary rigor,’’ science attempted to offer
a full and complete account of reality by way of empirical, documented
phenomena. In an act of false humility, it limited all discussion to what
was empirical and quantifiable, to what could be seen and demonstrated.
Foreshadowing the rise of logical positivism, the spirit of scientific pheno-
menism refused to consider any reality or truth outside appearances, be-
yond what shows up to the scientist. Blondel protested against such naively
construed realism in his 1896 essay, ‘‘The Letter on Apologetics’’:

The time is past when mathematics, physics or biology could be

thought to have a direct bearing on philosophy. . . . There is no
more continuity between scientific symbols and philosophical
ideas than there is between the qualities perceived by the senses
and the calculation based on these same data of intuition . . . There
is no passage from one to the other; and the sciences will develop
indefinitely without making any contact with what they are mis-
takenly supposed to signify; for it is no business of theirs to attain
or to reveal the final ground of things: their sole task is to consti-
tute an increasingly coherent system of relationships on the basis
of their own special conventions.55

More than anything, this quotation reveals an increasing frustration with

scientism’s imperialist encroachment on religion and philosophy. Blondel
53
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper & Row,
1962), 77.
54
Blondel, Action (1893), 59.
55
Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander
Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1964, 1994), 131–32.

286
 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

particularly objected to the positivist claim that religion and metaphysics

have been surpassed and replaced by science. He also objected to the Dar-
winist claim that morality and ultimate significance are nothing more than
survival of the fittest and natural selection.
Despite his objections, Blondel did not want to abandon science in
favor of philosophy or theology. He did not want to forever burn the brid-
ges between the sciences and the humanities on account of their differences
in nature and methods.56 According to the modern definition of science,
the hard sciences could not help but judge philosophy and religion to be
nonscientific and thus deprived of the status of true knowledge. The prob-
lem was not with the disciplines themselves, but with the definition of sci-
ence. If either philosophy or theology was to gain a voice within the
scientific community, then the definition of science must be broadened.

INTEGRAL REALISM

Blondel’s appraisal of early twentieth-century science was mixed; he was

both supportive and critical. He appreciated the encyclopedic spirit, the
enthusiasm for standardization within the fields of knowledge, and the
commitment to rigorously test evidence. He saw these as virtues of modern
science. However, when these virtues were pushed to the extreme, they mu-
tated into the vices of reductionism, determinism, and phenomenism. One
way to begin to restore balance to the scientific virtues, or at least mitigate
their vices, was to renegotiate the very definition of science. Thomas Kuhn
wondered in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ‘‘Can very much de-
pend on a definition of science? Can a definition tell a man whether he is a
scientist of not?’’57 The implied answer to his rhetorical question seems to
be ‘‘no,’’ but the esteemed sociologist of science, Thomas Gieryn of Indiana
University, objects: how science is demarcated and represented is of tremen-
dous sociological consequence. The answer to Kuhn’s questions should be
‘‘a hearty ‘yes.’ ’’58

56
He did come close to this possibility in his revised 1937–38 edition of L’Action in
which he discussed the need to ‘‘safeguard the inalienable domain of philosophy.’’ Mau-
rice Blondel, L’Action: L’action humain et les conditions de son aboutissement (Paris:
Alcan), 2: 94.
57
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 160, quoted in Thomas Gieryn, Cul-
tural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1999), 26, footnote 31.
58
Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science, 26, footnote 31.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ APRIL 2008

Blondel also seemed to intuit the importance of defining science at the

turn of the twentieth century. One might assume his renegotiation of ‘‘sci-
ence’’ would mean calling for limits to be imposed upon science and its
purview, but instead he called for expansion. What counted as science and
the sciences should be expanded, not contracted. The problem was not that
too much intellectual territory fell under the sway of science, but that not
enough knowledge and too few disciplines were recognized as scientific.
The correction lay not in opposing science, but in broadening it by recover-
ing some of its earlier and wider definitions. The usefulness of this kind of
approach to science has been borne out in the historical studies of John
Hedley Brooke on the complexities of science and its relationships and in
the recent ‘‘science wars’’ documented by Thomas Gieryn.59
Blondel himself employed the term ‘‘science’’ to refer to natural sci-
ences, subjective sciences, positivist sciences, mathematical sciences, and the
science of practice. He used the term in objective and subjective senses, as
both Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften.60 Science should not
be quarantined to one discipline or another, nor should there be allowed a
broad chasm between so-called ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘non-scientific’’ fields of
inquiry. As long as a discipline could show evidentiary rigor, standardized
procedures, and a comprehensive or encyclopedic account of the phenom-
ena, then it should be respected on its own terms. Science should by defini-
tion, as it were, be open to all forms of the mind’s search for true
knowledge; the ‘‘hard sciences’’ needed to make room for more kinds of
information and experience, but also the ‘‘soft’’ or ‘‘non’’ sciences needed
to take seriously matters of standardization, evidence, record keeping, and
evaluation.
Fiachra Long, a notable Blondel scholar, observes that for Blondel,
‘‘scientific knowledge acts as a heuristic base within the mind and points
the way towards the conscious development of every individual.’’ He goes
on to comment, ‘‘Any science that calls itself exact but which does not take
responsibility for integrating the knowledge it achieves around a single

59
John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991); Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science, see especially
the introduction and epilogue. I am indebted to an anonymous JHI reviewer for alerting
me to Gieryn.
60
Peter Henrici, ‘‘Les Structures de L’Action et la pensée française,’’ Maurice Blondel:
une dramatique de la modernité, ed. Dominique Folscheid (Paris: Editions Universitaires,
1990), 37, 32–43. In addition, Peter Henrici, ‘‘ ‘Unir l’ascétique très chrétienne à la psy-
chologie très physiologique’: les Notes-semaille de Blondel,’’ L’Action: Une dialectique
du salut, ed. M. J. Coutagne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), 17–42, esp. 23–26.

288
 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

point of awareness is not exact enough; for it contributes by its ethical

nullity to the degeneration of consciousness in the life-world.’’61 Scientific
inquiry that is worth its title always presupposes a moral teleology, a moral
responsibility to the community it serves. But, what is this ‘‘single point of
awareness’’ around which science must compose itself? Is it not the subjec-
tivity of the scientist, or even a whole scientific community? Did Blondel
trade scientism for relativism?
According to Blondel, the single point of awareness, the vinculum subs-
tantiale which holds life and science together, is lived action in all its beauty
and chaos. Action is not only the starting point but the necessary connec-
tion between the object of science and the subject working in science. The
necessity of action gives it its scientific standing. ‘‘Strictly speaking,’’
Blondel wrote in his Action (1893), ‘‘nothing is scientifically demonstrated
unless its necessity has been established.’’62 Action comports such a neces-
sity: action is not ‘‘partial or provisional, as knowledge can be,’’ because
action ‘‘is more than a fact, it is a necessity, which no doctrine denies since
such a denial would require a supreme effort, which no man avoids since
suicide is still an act.’’63 By force of its necessity and unavoidability, action
is a science.
Fundamentally, action is. Did Blondel intend to construct some sort of
action-based foundation for all knowledge and reality? Was this to be a
metaphysic based on the idea of action? A new foundationalism? Blondel
was widely acknowledged for his criticisms of Cartesianism and was quick
to reassure his audience that any fundamental theory or principle or link
which he might offer can only be made sensible and useful not by a logical
proof or concatenation but by fiction. ‘‘Here, then, it is the fiction itself
which enables us to reach reality.’’64 The basis of any and every science is,
ironically, not scientific, but narrative and interpretive. Blondel showed that
even the completely empirical science of chemistry was born out of an ini-
tiative that it cannot ‘‘scientifically’’ justify.65
His appeal to ‘‘the science of action’’ was not to establish a new foun-
dationalism but to undercut late nineteenth-century scientific foundational-
ism by acknowledging that all sciences presuppose certain fictions, or what
postmodernists might call narratives. As Jean-François Lyotard has ob-

61
Fiachra Long, ‘‘The Postmodern Flavor of Blondel’s Method,’’ International Philo-
sophical Quarterly 31 (1991), 21.
62
Blondel, Action (1893), 316.
63
Ibid., 9, 4.
64
Ibid., 68.
65
Ibid., 76.

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served, ‘‘Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the
true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowl-
edge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all.’’66 How else can
scientific ‘‘discoveries’’ be understood and explained except by means of a
story with actors, a setting, a context of activity, a beginning and an end?
Clearly, science makes itself intelligible by the process of narration, by ex-
plaining why these facts make sense in these conditions. Blondel was clear
that such narratives are not value-neutral. Thus he called them ‘‘fictions’’
to emphasize the fact that they were not told by omniscient, objective story-
tellers but by particular individuals in particular positions with particular
commitments. Such fictions have no legitimate claim to the status of ‘‘neces-
sary,’’ they could be told in other ways and according to other points of
view. They are always interpretations of events and observations. ‘‘They
[the sciences] render no account either of the way they abstract from reality
or of the way they come back to it and adjust to it.’’67 Blondel continues,
‘‘Though they seem grounded in reality and even master over it, they are
foreign to it’’ for the reason that ‘‘the competence of the science does not
belong to the science.’’ In truth, ‘‘the final certitude remains grounded on
the initial fiction.’’68
In his evaluation of the modern sciences, no matter how developed,
specialized, or exact they become, ‘‘they do not exhaust, they do not attain
perceived reality.’’69 In the end, ‘‘Science cannot stop with science.’’70 The
realism to which Blondel aspired was much more integrative than that
which the scientists or philosophers of his day conceived. He realized that
science could not make sense without the support of other disciplines and
other frameworks. And, while the natural sciences could not answer the
questions of philosophy and religion, philosophy and religion needed the
input of science to answer their own questions. There is a ‘‘deep-seated
connection’’ between all the disciplines such that ‘‘although the theories of
the positives sciences cannot be taken in any way as the material elements
of metaphysical constructions, they are, nevertheless, not arbitrary at bot-
tom or detached from the rest of human life, which forms, as a whole, a
single unique problem.’’71 Neither philosophy nor science alone provides a
66
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1979), 29.
67
Blondel, Action (1893), 70.
68
Ibid., 70, 71.
69
Ibid., 71.
70
Ibid., 86.
71
Blondel, Letter on Apologetics, 132.

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 English ✦ Maurice Blondel and the Sciences

sufficiently rich account of reality. A well-rounded appreciation of the

world is pluralistic and integrative.
Blondel’s integral realism opens the conversation to the scientific and
the material as well as the existential and the eternal. These two dimensions
do not spar as competitors, but cooperate as collaborators. One is a quanti-
tative impulse and the other a qualitative, both are reciprocal.72 Each
spawns the other, is nourished by the other, and at times disciplines the
other in this symbiotic and evolving relationship. Blondel explains, ‘‘Real-
ity, then, is not in any one of the terms more than the others, nor in the one
without the others; it resides in the multiplicity of the reciprocal relations
which joins them all together; it is the complexus itself.’’73 Reality never
presents itself as easy to master or distill into neat formulas. The complexity
of reality must be matched by the integrality of the scientist’s discourse. To
describe Blondel’s metaphysic as ‘‘integral,’’ as Paul Archambault explains,
is to highlight his commitment to keep before him the host of elements,
both concrete and speculative, natural and spiritual, that are endlessly
being combined, pulled apart, and recombined.74
Although Blondel achieved this integral realism with an original style
and force, he was not the first one to attempt such a synthesis. Emmanuel
Joyau had attempted something similar eight years earlier. In his Petit cours
de philosophie, Joyau classified the sciences in terms of mathematics, phys-
ics, natural sciences, and sciences of language, social sciences, and philoso-
phy. He acknowledged that ‘‘the goal of science is the certain knowledge of
truth’’ (which accords with Lalande’s second definition of science), yet he
did not stop with this platitude that both positivists and philosophers could
affirm. He contended that the certitude we have about our scientifically
acquired knowledge is ‘‘the highest degree of belief, it is the state of the
spirit where we are assured that our opinion is true.’’75 Of course, there are
different kinds of certitude, for instance, experimental, rational, and moral
certitude. The more Joyau problematized the definition of science, the more
it became clear that ‘‘the study of the sciences leads naturally to the meta-
physical search.’’76 The dilemmas that the sciences raise produce philosophi-
72
L’Action (1937), 2: 106.
73
Blondel, Action (1893), 414.
74
Emmanuel Tourpe, ‘‘Comme ‘un bruissement de fin murmure’: la métaphysique du
dernier Blondel,’’ Penser l’être de L’action: la métaphysique du ‘‘dernier’’ Blondel, ed. E.
Tourpe (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 6–7.
75
Emmanuel Joyau, Petit cours de philosophie à l’usage des élèves de mathématiques
élémentaires et des candidats au baccalauréat ès sciences (Paris, Gamier Frères, 1885),
38.
76
Ibid., 62.

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cal dilemmas. Gradually, one is led from science to the ultimate consideration
of first philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. Joyau wrote, ‘‘it is the su-
preme effort of human intelligence to discover the first principle, the first
cause of all things, the supreme explication that makes sense of everything;
it leads directly to natural theology or theodicy; that is to say the science of
God.’’77
In his Petit cours de philosophie, Joyau articulated what Blondel im-
plicitly knew and acted upon. Joyau made explicit the kind of integral real-
ism guiding Blondel’s efforts, which is this: study of the natural world does
not choke out metaphysical and moral questions, it inspires them. One does
not set aside scientific pursuits to ponder eternal questions; rather, nature
opens up eternity and physical sciences lead naturally into spiritual and
metaphysical sciences. True to this philosophical insight and his Roman
Catholic faith, Blondel’s guiding concern is to avoid divorcing scientific in-
quiry from philosophical and spiritual inquiry. Stated in an explicitly theo-
logical way, Blondel’s work on the nature of science springs from his
commitment not to cleave the natural from the supernatural or vice versa.
Instead, he insists on understanding the natural and the material in relation
to the supernatural, the spiritual, and the philosophical. ‘‘To reach man,’’
he says, ‘‘God must go through all of nature and offer Himself to him under
the most brute of material species. To reach God, man must go through all
of nature and find Him under the veil where He hides Himself only to
become accessible.’’78
The purpose of the present essay ends where Blondel’s thought begins
to shade into openly religious themes, even though for him that is the next
logical step in the integrative process. His vision for natural science, human
science, social science, philosophical science, and finally sacred science is an
ambitious one; it calls forth the best in every discipline and all searches for
truth and makes laughable the idea that science can stop with science.

Campbell University.

77
Ibid., 37. A few years prior to Joyau, P. I. Carbonnelle attempted a similar move. He
reasoned that the material phenomena observed by science, if they prove to be substantial,
innately indicate a substantial cause behind them, which puts one in the realm of philoso-
phy. Thus, although there is interaction between the two realms, science is restricted to
the material world and philosophy to the intellectual and causal world. P. I. Carbonnelle,
Les confins de la science et de la philosophie (Bruxelles: Société générale de libraire ca-
tholique, 1881), 1: 2–3.
78
Blondel, Action (1893), 410.

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