In the lectures collected in La Nature et l’esprit (1926), M. Émile Boutroux sets out to heal the divisions created by the Scientific Revolution and its aftermath, divisions between nature and spirit, science and philosophy, religion and reason. Boutroux, a French spiritualist, was an ardent opponent of scientific materialism and its systematic dismantling of what he calls l’esprit humain [“the human spirit”]. According to Boutroux, the realm of the human spirit—which includes realities such as faith, philosophy, love, and justice—can neither be reduced to purely natural processes nor quarantined to its own corner of human existence.
In most of the lectures, Boutroux pursues the same strategy. First, he problematizes any attempt to advance a stark division between the natural and the spiritual. Given the advances of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Boutroux believed this dualism would gradually lead to the total eclipse of the life of the spirit. Next, he suggests that both the natural and the spiritual are strengthened through consistent contact with each other. According to him, this conclusion is supported not only by the human spirit, but by the way science often seeks answers for non-scientific questions. “Il n’est pas nécessaire, ” Boutroux writes, “pour maintenir la légitimité de la vie de l’esprit comme telle, de la transporter dans un monde à part, sans lien aucun avec le monde dont s’occupe la science, ce qui risque toujours de faire apparaître ce monde supérieur comme chimérique. La science elle-même, pour qui en critique les conditions, nous y introduit. La nature nous fournit un point d’appui pour dépasser la nature” (27). [“To maintain the legitimacy of the life of the spirit as such, it is not necessary to transport it to a world apart, without any link to the world of science, which is always liable to make this superior world appear chimerical. Science itself, for those who critique its conditions, introduces us to [the world of the spirit]. Nature provides us with a means of going beyond nature.”]
Rather than being skeptical of modern science, Boutroux encourages its progress and the knowledge it furnishes. What he does object to, however, is what he sees as an imperious, reductionist tendency. “La science est-elle, en effet, destinée à absorber l’homme tout entier, et à le réduire en poussière d’atome ?” (137). [“Is science destined to absorb the whole person, and to reduce it to atomic dust?”] This overreach threatens human flourishing, which depends on solidarity, personality, liberty, dignity, equality, humaneness—none of which are, strictly speaking, scientific (263).
Still, Boutroux insists that the realm of the human spirit is a friend to science, not its rival. His hope for the future is that “[d]ès lors, la philosophie et la science, loin de se contrarier, concourent à élever l’esprit humain” (268). [“From now on, philosophy and science, far from contradicting one another, contribute to the elevation of the human spirit.”] The purely natural and the spiritual intersect; the mystical and the psychological illuminate each other; historical confrontations of conscience and the law have bettered human conditions; religion and reason are not rivals but rather both help to mediate between God and his creation. According to Boutroux, these are the sorts of ententes cordiales that the modern world sorely needs.
