VACHEROT, ETIENNE (1809-1897)

This article appears in Volume V27, Page 834 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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VACHEROT, ETIENNE (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

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

WORK

Democratie (1859) led to a political prosecution and imprisonment. In 1868 he was elected to the French

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

. On the fall of the Empire he took an active part in politics, was moire of a

district

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

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

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

OBLIGATION

of the moral law. In religion, which was his main

interest

INTEREST

, he was much influenced by

Hegel

FRIEDRICH
- FRIEDRICH, JOHANN (1836— )
_.html">HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM
FRIEDRICH
- FRIEDRICH, JOHANN (1836— )
(1770-1831)

, 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

ADVOCATES, FACULTY OF

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).

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