Background
Boutroux, Émile was born in 1845 in Montrouge, near Paris.
philosopher of religion Philosopher of science
Boutroux, Émile was born in 1845 in Montrouge, near Paris.
Taught at the Universities of Montpellier and Nancy, then (1878) at the École Normale Supérieure, and finally at the Sorbonne. Elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales in 1898, and to the Académie Française in 1912.
Boutroux was concerned with the problems created by the tension between freedom and determinism, and necessity and contingency. His proposed solution tried to do justice to both science and religion. He maintained that, in the natural world, there is no pure or logical necessity, which is confined to areas such as mathematics. Further, within the sciences themselves, there are several different levels: the physical, the biological and the human; or the inorganic, the organic and the thinking, none of which is reducible to any of the other strata. He thus reached the position that there is a qualitative, and not merely a quantitative, element in science. Mechanical laws are progressively less capable of providing a full account of phenomena as one moves from the physical, through the biological, to the human sciences, because there is a greater amount of contingency and lack of uniformity at each level. One example of non-uniformity given by Boutroux was biological evolution, in which there is always an element of novelty, and this is one of the pointers to the possibility of there being a creative act or principle on which everything else depends. According to Boutroux, scientific understanding can never provide a completely objective view of the world, as data is always selected to form abstractions, instead of an appreciation of the wholeness of concrete existences. A scientific understanding of the world around us is only one aspect of the use of human reason, which can and should also be employed in the spiritual, moral and aesthetic dimensions, to allow for the full development of human beings. Boutroux thought that science was to be placed in a wider metaphysical framework, and to this end he developed a theory of a hierarchy of perfections, which owes much to Leibniz. At one end of the hierarchy is God, who is absolutely perfect and thus pure act, and at the other are inorganic material things, which are nevertheless endowed with a potential spirituality towards which they are constantly striving. There is no essential difference between the inorganic, the organic and the spiritual, and no purely mechanistic causes, but only teleological ones. The whole of creation is a system imbued with vitalism. The reason of human beings can degenerate into mere habit, or it can render us capable of belief in God, who is the creative principle of life and who, by analogy with the life of the whole universe, is recognized to be the infinite mind or person. Religion and science should not be viewed as conflicting, but as complementary: both are legitimate areas for the employment of human reason, and both are needed for human development. Whilst the works of Boutroux rightly stress that scientific explanations are limited, and that even within the sciences there is no one model of explanation, one criticism of his thought is that the attempt to postulate a hierarchy of perfection, and in particular to extend this beyond experience to end in God, is unwarranted speculation.