Fouillée claims to take up a position midway between the materialists and the idealists. Neither standpoint is, in his view, adequate to describe reality. He is particularly opposed to the materialistic and mechanistic thought of the English Evolutionary School, as presented by Spencer and Huxley, with its pretensions to be scientific. Fouillee accepts, with them, the notion of evolution, but he disagrees entirely with Spencer’s attempt to refer everything to mechanism, the mechanism of matter in motion. In any case, Fouillée claims, movement is a very slender and one-sided element of experience upon which to base our characterisation of all reality, for the idea of motion arises only from our visual and tactual experience. He revolts from the epiphenomenalism of Huxley as from a dire heresy. Consciousness cannot be regarded as a mere “flash in the pan.” Even science must admit that all phenomena are to be defined by their relation to, and action upon, other phenomena. Consciousness, so regarded, will be seen, he claims, as a unique power, possessing the property of acting upon matter and of initiating movement. It is itself a factor, and a very vital one, in the evolutionary process. It is no mere reflex or passive representation. On this point of the irreducibility of the mental life and the validity of its action, Fouillée parts company with Taine. On the other hand, he disagrees with the idealistic school of thought, which upholds a pure intellectualism and for whom thought is the accepted characterisation of reality. This, complains Fouillée, is as much an abstraction and a one-sided view as that of Spencer.