Pi

iv THE METHOD OF TAINE.

greatest aversion is for affirmations without proof, which it calls préjudices, and for unquestioning belief, which it calls credulity " ; ^ it opposes reason to faith, nature to révélation, experiment and induction to a priori formulae. The struggle between thèse rival views of life, which has been in progress since the Renaissance, is what has sometimes been called the warfare of science and religion. To Descartes rather than to Bacon belongs the honor of having brought the natural sciences into entire accord with the modem spirit. He reduced the phénoménal world to a mère " problem of space and movement ^^ ; he substituted quantities and mathematical measurements for the discussion of qualities; he banished from science the spéculations about entities, essences, occult properties and final causes which had encumbered the philosophy of the schools. Descartes, however, still remained in great measure mediaeval in his psychology, conceiving as he did of the soûl as living quite apart from the body, having its seat in the pineal gland, in much the same way, to quote a récent writer, " as the hermit crab résides in its borrowed shell." The constant tendency since Descartes has been to deny man this superiority of essence over the rest of création, and to assimilate him more and more, body and soûl, to the lower animais. Molière, in les Femmes savantes^ is one of the first to protest against the mechanical séparation of the

versait 1871. — Notes sur F Angleterre ^ 187a. — Un Séjour en France de rfqi-i'jqSt 1872. — les Origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols., 1876-1893. — Derniers essais de critique et d'histoire^ 1894. — Carnet de voyage, 1896.

Among the more important Criticisms on Taine are the following: Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, t. xiii, 1857, and Nouveaux lundis, t. viii, 1864. — Gustave Planche in Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1857. — Edmond Scherer, Mélanges de critique religieuse, 1858. — Emile Montégut, Essais sur la littérature anglaise, 1863. — Caro, l'Idée de Dieu et ses nouveaux critiques, 1864. — Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 1883. — Emile Hennequin, la Critique scientifique, x888. — F. Brunetière, révolution des genres, t. i, 1889. — G. Monod, Renan, Taine, et Michelet, 1894. — A. de Margerie, H. Taine, 1894. — G. Barzellotti, Ippolito Taine, 1895. — G. Pellissier, Nouveaux essais de littérature contemporaine, 1895.

The èssays of Bourget and Monod are especially recommended.

* Science et religion, p. 13.

THE METH03 0F TAIP9E, v

soûl from the body, for which the précieuses sought a sanction in

Descartes:

" Oui, mon corps est moi-même," and

" Mon âme et mon corps marchent de compagnie," etc.

The last step is taken by Taine when he aâirms that the soûl is a natural product, and should therefore be treated by the samemethods as other natural phenomena. In psychology as in the other sciences we must refrain from ail considération of qualities and absolute values, and confine ourselves to observation and exact measurements. ^^ Science draws near at last and draws near to man ; it has passed the visible and palpable world of stars, plants, and stones to which men had disdainfuUy confined it ; it is laying hold upon the soûl, having at its disposai ail the keen and exact instruments of which three hundred years of experiment hâve proved the précision and measured the scope." ^

This one thought — the application of scientific method to the^ soûl — runs through ail the writings of Taine, and gives them their extraordinary unity. He has ranged through ancient and modem history, literature, and art in search of illustrations for this his main thesis. A book or picture interests him chiefly as a ^'sign^^ or " document " giving évidence of some phase of the human spirit in the past. This gênerai character visible in a work of art is due, not to the free choice of the artist, but to the fact that he acted under the impulse of a " master faculty^'; and the nature of this "master faculty " is determined in turn by the artist's " race " and heredity, by the climate and " environment " which has made his race what it is, and by the ^^ moment " in the historical development of his race at which his life has happened to fall. Under this accumulation of outer influences the free agency of the individual tends v' entirely to disappear. For it would not be possible to prove that " vice and virtue are products like sugar and vitriol," ^ if a single act of the individual will intervened to break the chain of natural causes and thus bafïïe ail the prévisions of the analyst. This de-

'^Liit. ang.f iv, p. 423. > Introduction^ p. xi.