[45] Fouillée stands in marked contrast to Comte in his general acquaintance with the history of ideas. Comte, like Spencer, knew little of any philosophy but his own. Fouillée, however, was well schooled, not only in Plato and the ancients, but had intimate knowledge of the work of Kant, Comte, Spencer, Lotze, Renouvier, Lachelier, Boutroux and Bergson. [46] This is also the idea expressed at length in his _Avenir de la Métaphysique_, 1889. Fouillée had no desire to offer merely another eclecticism _à la mode de Cousin_; he selects, therefore, his own principle of procedure. This principle is found in his notion of _idée-force_. Following ancient usage, he employs the term “idea” for _any_ mental presentation. For Fouillée, however, ideas are not _idées-spectacles_, merely exercising a platonic influence “remote as the stars shining above us.” They are not merely mental reproductions of an object, real or hypothetical, outside the mind. Ideas are in themselves forces which endeavour to work out their own realisation. Fouillée opposes his doctrine to the evolutionary theory of Spencer and Huxley. He disagrees with their mechanism and epiphenomenalism, pointing out legitimately that our ideas, far from being results of purely physical and independent causes, are themselves factors, and very vital factors, in the process of evolution. Fouillée looks upon the mechanistic arrangement of the world as an expression or symbol of idea or spirit in a manner not unlike that of Lotze.