He sees in it the fetish of the Absolute and the Infinite and the lure of pantheism, a doctrine to which he opposes his “Personalism.” He reminds the scientists that personality is the great factor to which all knowledge is related, and that all knowledge is relative. A law is a law, but the guarantee of its permanence is not a law. It is no more easy, claims Renouvier, to say why phenomena do not stop than it is to know why they have begun. Laws indeed abide, but “not apart from conscious personalities who affirm them.”[25] Further, attacking the self-confident and dogmatic attitude in the scientists, Renouvier reminds them that it is impossible to demonstrate _every_ proposition; and in an important note on “Induction and the Sciences”[26] he points out that induction always implies a certain _croyance_. This is no peculiar, mystical thing; it is a fact, he remarks, which colours all the interesting acts of human personality. He here approaches Cournot in observing that all speculation is attended by a certain coefficient of doubt or uncertainty and so becomes really rational belief. With Cournot, too, Renouvier senses the importance of analogy and probability in connection with hypotheses in the world of nature and of morals. In short, he recognises as central the problem of freedom. [25] _Logique_, vol. 2, p. 321. [26] Note B to chap. xxxv. of the _Logique_, vol. 2, p. 13. Renouvier attacks Comte’s classification or “hierarchy” of the sciences as mischievous and inexact. It is not based, he claims, upon any distinction in method, nor of data. It is not true that the sciences are arranged by Comte in an order where they successively imply one another, nor in an order in which they have come to be constituted as “positive”.[27] [27] This outburst of attack is a sample of Renouvier’s usual attitude to Positivism. (_Deuxième Essai_, vol. 2, pp. 166-170.) He justifies to the scientist the formulation of hypothesis as a necessary working method of co-ordinating in a provisional manner varying phenomena. Many hypotheses and inductions of science are, however, unjustifiable from a strictly logical standpoint, Renouvier reminds us. His chief objection, however, is that those hypotheses and inductions are put forward so frequently as certainties by a science which is dogmatic and surpasses its limits.