[15] _Ibid_., pp. 117-137. [16] _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, p. 129. On examining closely the difference between Renouvier and Fouillée over this problem of freedom, we may attribute it to the fact that while the one thinker is distinctly and rigorously an upholder of continuity, the other believes in no such absolute continuity. For Fouillée there is, in a sense, nothing new under the sun, while Renouvier in his thought, which has been well described as a philosophy of discontinuity, has a place for new things, real beginnings, and he is in this way linked up to the doctrine of creative development as set forth ultimately by Bergson. It will be seen also as we proceed that Fouillée, for all he has to say on behalf of determinism, is not so widely separated in his view of freedom from that worked out by Bergson, although at the first glance the gulf between them seems a wide one. Fouillée, while attacking Renouvier, did not spare that other acute thinker, Lachelier, from the whip of his criticism. He takes objection to a passage in that writer’s _Induction_ where he advocates the doctrine that the production of ideas “is free in the most rigorous sense of that word, since each idea is in itself absolutely independent of that which precedes it, and is born out of nothing, as is a world.” To this view of the spontaneity of the spirit Fouillée opposes the remark that Lachelier is considering only the _new forms_ which are assumed by a mechanism which is always operating under the same laws of causality. He asks us in this connection to imagine a kaleidoscope which is being turned round. The images which succeed each other will be in this sense a formal creation, a form _independent_ of that which went before, but, as he is anxious to remind us, the same mechanical and geometrical laws will be operating continually in producing these forms. Having had these encounters with the upholders of freedom, and thus to some degree having conveyed the impression of being on the side of the determinists, Fouillée proceeds to the task he had set himself—namely, that of reconciliation. He felt the unsatisfactoriness of Kant’s treatment of freedom,[17] and he endeavours to remedy the lack in Kant of a real link between the determinism of the natural sciences and the human consciousness of freedom, realised in the practical reason. Fouillée proposes to find in his _idées-forces_ a middle term and to offer us a solution of the problem at issue in the dispute. [17] See above, p. 136.