ETIENNE

See also:

• ETIENNE VACHEROT (1809-1897)

VACHEROT (1809-1897)  , French philosophical writer, was born of peasant parentage at Torcenay, near Langres, on the 29th of July 1809 . He was educated at the Ecole Nor-male, and returned thither as director of studies in 1838, after some years spent in provincial schoolmasterships . In 1839 he succeeded his master Cousin as professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne . His Histoire critique de l'ecole d'Alexandrie (3 vols . 1846-51), his first and best-known work, drew on him attacks from the Clerical party which led to his suspension in 1851 . Shortly afterwards he refused to swear allegiance to the new imperial government, and was dismissed the service . His work Democratie (1859) led to a political prosecution and imprisonment . In 1868 he was elected to the French Academy . On the fall of the Empire he took an active part in politics, was moire of a district of Paris during the siege, and in 1871 was in the National Assembly, voting as a Moderate Liberal . In 1893 he drew nearer the Conservatives, after which he was never . again successful as a parliamentary candidate, though he maintained his principles vigorously in the press . He died on the 28th of July 1897 Vacherot was a man of high character and adhered strictly to his principles, which were generally opposed to those of the party in power . His chief philosophical importance consists in the fact that he was a leader in the attempt to revivify French philosophy by the new thought of Germany, to which he had been introduced by Cousin, but of which he never had more than a second-hand knowledge .

Metaphysics he held to be based on psychology . He maintains the unity and freedom of the soul, and the absolute obligation of the moral law . In religion, which was his main interest, he was much influenced by Hegel, and appears somewhat in the ambiguous position of a sceptic anxious to believe . He sees insoluble contradictions in every mode of conceiving God as real, yet he advocates religiousbelief, though the object of that belief have but an abstract or imaginary existence . His other works are: La Mitaphysique et la science (1858), Essais de philosophie critique (1864), La Religion (1869), La Science et la conscience (187o), Le Nouveau Spiritualisme (1884), La Democratie liberale (1892) . See we Laprune, Etienne Vacherot (Paris, 1898) .