By recognising the sciences philosophy can avoid the fallacy of ideology on the one hand and naturalism on the other. Unlike the old eclecticism, the new thought is able to take account of science and to criticise its assertions. We have seen how this has been accomplished, and the rigidly mechanical view of the world abandoned for one into which human freedom enters as a real factor. This transforms the view of history and shows us human beings creating that history and not merely being its blind puppets. History offers no cheerful outlook for the easy-going optimist; it is not any more to be regarded as mere data for pessimistic reflections, but rather a record which prompts a feeling of responsibility. The world is not ready-made, and if there is to be progress it must be willed by us and achieved by our struggle and labour. The doctrine of immanence upon which the modern tendency is to insist, in place of the older idea of transcendence, makes us feel, not only that we are free, but that our freedom is not in opposition to, or in spite of, the divine spirit, but is precisely an expression of divine immanence. Instead of the gloomy conception of a whole which determines itself apart from us, we feel ourselves part, and a very responsible part, of a reality which determines itself collectively and creatively by its own action, by its own ideals, which it has itself created. This freedom must extend not only to our conceptions of history but also to those of ethics and of religion. “English philosophy ends in considering nature as an assemblage of facts; German philosophy looks upon it chiefly as a system of laws. If there is a place midway between the two nations it belongs to us Frenchmen. We applied the English ideas in the eighteenth century; we can in the nineteenth give precision to the German ideas. What we have to do is to temper, amend and complete the two spirits, one by the other, to fuse them into one, to express them in a style that shall be intelligible to everybody and thus to make of them the universal spirit.” Such was Taine’s attitude, and it indicates clearly the precise position of French thought. We are apt to consider Taine purely as an empiricist, but we must remember that he disagreed with the radical empiricism of John Stuart Mill. His own attitude was largely that of a reaction against the vague spiritualism of the Eclectic School, especially Cousin’s eclecticism, a foreign growth on French soil, due to German influence. The purely _a priori_ constructions of the older spiritualism could find no room, and allowed none, for the sciences. This was sufficient to doom it, and to lead naturally to a reaction of a positive kind, revolting from all _a priori_ constructions.