While the new spiritualist current was thus tending to a position far removed from that of Taine, at the commencement of our period, a wavering note was struck by the idealist Fouillée (1838-1912), who, while maintaining a general attitude in harmony with the new doctrines endeavoured to effect a reconciliation with the more positive attitude to science and philosophy. In his _philosophie des ideés-forces_[42] he endeavoured to combine and reconcile the diverging attitudes of Plato and of Comte. He shows a scorn of the neo-critical though of Renouvier. He wrote in his shorter life more books than did Renouvier, and he is conspicuous among this later group of thinkers for his mass-production of books, which appeared steadily at the rate of one _per annum_ to the extent of some thirty-seven volumes, after he gave up his position as _maître de conférence_ at the Ecole Normale owing to ill-health.[43] [42] His _Evolutionnisme des Idées-forces_ appeared in 1890, _La Psychologie des Idées-forces_ three years later. His _Morale des Idées-forces_ belongs to the next century (1907), but its principles were contained already in his thesis _Liberté et Déterminisme_. [43] He only held this for three years, 1872-75. Fouillée, with the noblest intentions, set himself to the solution of that problem which we have already indicated as being the central one of our period, the relation of science and ethics, or, in brief, the problem of freedom. This was the subject of his thesis, undoubtedly the best book he ever wrote, _La Liberté et le Déterminisme_, which he sustained in 1872.[44] The attitude which he takes in that work is the keynote to his entire philosophy. Well grounded in a knowledge of the history of systems of philosophy, ancient and modern, he recognises elements of truth in each, accompanied by errors due mainly to a one-sided perspective.[45] He recalls a statement of Leibnitz to the effect that most systems are right in their assertions and err in their denials. Fouillée was convinced that there was reconciliation at the heart of things, and that the contradictions we see are due to our point of view. Facing, therefore, in this spirit, the problems of the hour, he set himself “to reconcile the findings of science with the reality of spirit, to establish harmony between the determinism upheld by science and the liberty which the human spirit acclaims, between the mechanism of nature and the aspirations of man’s heart, between the True which is the object of all science and the Good which is the goal of morality.”[46] [44] This work created quite a stir in the intellectual and political world in France just after the war. Fouillée’s book led to an attack on the ministry, which did not go so far as that occasioned by Renouvier’s volume in 1849. (See p. 61.)