"Science cannot stop with science" Maurice Blondel and the sciences.

As the nineteenth century steamed into the twentieth, a sense of anxiety swelled among many philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people about the extraordinary progress of science. In the fields of evolutionary biology, paleontology, physics, astronomy, mechanics, and medicine, scientists were expanding their dominion across all spheres of knowledge. Scientific imperialism loomed as a real threat in the minds of many people, including some scientists. Prime Minister of England William Gladstone voiced the commonly felt anxiety in 1881 when he said, "Let the scientific men stick to their sciences and leave philosophy and religion to poets, philosophers and theologians."1 In 1893 Pope Leo XIII issued a similarly toned encyclical, Providentissimus Deus, "There can never, indeed, be any real discrepancy between the theologian and the physicist [or scientist], as long as each confines himself within his own lines."2 Leo's fear that those lines were being trampled under foot, even as he spoke, was revealed in his admonition: "to the Professor of Sacred Scripture a knowledge of natural science will be of very great assistance in detecting . . . attacks on the Sacred Books, and in refuting them."3 In the pope's view, science was in danger of unchaining itself and trespassing into areas in which it had no jurisdiction.The same year as Leo XIIi's Prouidentissimus Dens, a certain Frenchborn, Roman Catholic student of philosophy, Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) submitted and defended a controversial thesis before the faculty at the Sorbonne on "L'Action. Essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la pratique" or "Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice" (referred to in this paper as Action [1893]). Facing a packed gallery and a table of mostly unsympathetic examiners, Blondel's defense lasted four grueling hours. In the end, his thesis was reluctantly but unanimously accepted for its methodological vigor and its "noble inspiration." Although he was granted the doctorate, the controversy caused the administration to refuse him a university teaching post.The thesis disgruntled and even offended many in the secular French university system because of the way it integrated concrete action, philosophical thought, religious experience, and scientific knowledge in a unified discourse. It crossed the lines that had become the obsession of the late nineteenth century between religion and science, philosophy and theology, ideas and actions. Blondel trespassed into science with the tools of philosophy and the spirit of religion. And yet, Blondel's purpose was not to shame science into submission to philosophy or faith. What the examiners at the Sorbonne finally had to admit was that Blondel was not proposing a simple either-or situation-either science or philosophy, reason or faith, ideas or actions-in which case he could have been dismissed out of hand; Blondel was attempting to hold the two sides together in a synthesis, a new philosophy of action that was equally scientific and metaphysical. He wanted to integrate the full range of disciplines into the mix of action. He aimed "to examine to what indirect and tacit borrowings each one of [the disciplines] owes its existence and its progress, [and] how finally a mediation is necessary" between them.4The source of Blondel's inspiration for this new synthesis was Emile Boutroux (1845-1921), with whom he came into contact upon his arrival as a twenty year old student at the Ecole normale superieure in August 1881 (unfortunately also the same year Bergson graduated and left the school, so the two never met there). Blondel credits his teacher and mentor Boutroux as being the principal guide to appreciating and interpreting the sciences.5 More than simply introducing the natural sciences, Boutroux taught and modeled how to integrate the sciences and the humanities. Boutroux himself was appalled that at the Ecole normale superieure the sciences and the humanities were completely cordoned off from each other and he worked diligently to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and cooperation similar to that enjoyed by the German universities. …