Durkheim suggested that the sociological study of religious phenomena would bring new life to the discussion of problems that previously only philosophers debated (1912a: 12, t. 1995: 8). This suggestion indicates that he perceived the eclectic spiritualist tradition as moribund. Of course, this philosophical tradition had already begun to change considerably if we take Paul Janet as representative of the generation of eclectic spiritualists that followed Cousin. The positions Durkheim took in his philosophy lectures at the Lycée de Sens (1884a) reflect this changing tradition. On the one hand, like Cousin, he regarded psychology as the philosophical discipline that provided a foundation for logic, ethics, and metaphysics. On the other hand, however, his views on scientific method and the role of representative ideas in philosophy mirror the later eclectic spiritualism of Janet. Also, Durkheim's interpretations of major figures in the history of philosophy such as Kant reveal an eclectic spiritualist influence.

The philosophical views expressed in Lalande's recently discovered notes from Durkheim's philosophy course at the Lycée de Sens suggest a new way to interpret Durkheim's career. In the Sens lectures, he was already seeking to replace the introspective psychology of his spiritualist predecessors with an empirical, hypothetico-deductive psychology as the foundation for the other three philosophical sciences. Although Durkheim shared with the spiritualists the goal of making philosophy scientific, conceptions of scientific method among French academic philosophers had shifted.