The philosophical position occupied by Léon Brunschvicg can be described as intellectualism, idealism, critical idealism, rationalism, or spiritualism. All of these labels are appropriate provided they are used correctly, as each of these viewpoints has a counterfeit version: there exists an idealism that reifies ideas, a false intellectualism that reduces intelligence to its discursive function, and a spiritualism that is simply the reverse of materialism. The only way to avoid going astray is to return to the fundamental activity of thought, which, primarily, is the act of judgment. Brunschvicg’s philosophy is a philosophy of judgment, not in the sense of a classification of logical or grammatical forms of judgment, but in the intellectualist sense of an analysis of the connections made by the mind (esprit) in its spontaneity and its infinite effort to understand.
To state that the mind is judgment does not imply that it is the medium of judgment: the mind is not a substrate, not something that can be pinned down easily. It is impossible to objectify it without immediately seeing its constitutive power slip away, just as it is unrealistic to define it, because Brunschvicg believed, in the same way as Bergson, that the mind manifests itself in a moving, creative form. True spirituality is a tension in the direction of the norms of truth and justice, and philosophy will only achieve its goal if it is able to show the movement the mind uses to enlighten itself. Brunschvicg assumed a markedly constructivist position in this regard: the mind renews itself by reorganizing thought internally, as demonstrated by the history of scientific reason in particular…