VI THE METHOD OF TAINE

terminism or scientific fatalism, though nowhere expressly formulated by Taine, is a necessary coroUary of his doctrine.

Taine is also led logically by his method to deny the existence of the soûl in the sensé of a permanent ego behind the flux of phenomena. Thus understood, the soûl is only the last and most y troublesome of the medîaeval " entities " of which the positivist is ^ trying to purge science. The ego in the eyes of Taine is only a résultant — the point of convergence of certain natural forces, and having no reality apart from thèse forces, or from what he calls the "succession of its events."^ " Seings, whether physical or moral," seen from this point of view, resemble " an infinité number of rockets .. . forever and unceasingly rising and falling in the blackness of the void."2 Man, thus bereft of ail principle of superiority over nature, is tossed helplessly in the vast ebb and flow of natural forces :

" O we poor orphans of nothing — alone on that lonely shore — Born of the brainless nature who knew not that which she bore î "

In a celebrated image * Taine compares the position of the human family in the midst of the blind and indiffèrent powers of nature to that of a lot of field-mice exposed to the tramplings of a herd of éléphants ; and he concludes that " the best fruit of our science is cold résignation which, pacifying and preparing the spirit, reduçes suffering to bodily pain."* Bourget* has traced the relation between this philosophy of Taine and the pessimism and discouragement so rife in France during the last génération. Ail the nobler aspirations of man, ail his notions of conduct, had clustered around the old-time conception of the soûl, and that of the struggle between a higher and lower self. The weakening of the traditional belief has been followed by such an unsettling of ail fixed standards, by such intellectual and moral chaos, that we are inclined to ask whether the modem man has not lost

* *' La file de ses événements."— Préface de rintelligence , p. 9.

* Id.y p. II.

' Vie et opinions de Thomas Graindorge^ p. 265.

^ Essais de Psychologie contemporaine t p> 233 and following.

THE METHOD OF TAINE, Vil

in force of will and character more than an équivalent of what he'^ has gained in scientiiic knowledge of life. Do we not miss in Goethe himself, that high-priest of the modem spirit, a certain élévation and purity which we find, for example, in Pascal, one of the last great représentatives of the mediseval idealism ? The triumph of naturalism has been followed by a serions falling ofif, for the moment at least, in the more purely spiritual activities of man. Taine is said to hâve resented the claims of writers like Zola of the naturalistic school to be his disciples. Yet there is a real relation between the doctrines of Taine and those of Zola and the other promoters of what has been termed la littérature brutale — the literature which exalts the power of the animal passions, proclaims the tyranny of tempérament, and seeks the determining factors of conduct in the blood and nerves. Taine himself in his English Literature has multiplied epithets describing the irrésistible pressure of natural causes upon man — the fatality of the primary instincts.

The main fault to find with Taine and his foUowers is that in their eagemess to apply natural methods to psychology, they hâve y failed to respect sufficiently the mystery of personality. Sainte- Beuve, anxious though he was to write "l'histoire naturelle des esprits," the history of the human spirit as determined by nature, showed greater prudence when he confessed : " We shall doubtless never be able to treat man in exactly the same way as plants or animais." ^ The contrary supposition has found fitting expression in a certain school of expérimental psychology. Emerson perceived this drift toward scientific materialism and raised a cry of waming : " I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must foUow. On this platform one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the créative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of thèse high powers we awake from inefFectual

. ^ Nouveaux lundis^ t. 3, p. 16.

Viii THE METHOD OF TAINE.

struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state/^ ^ We may add that in the most commonplace personality there is a fraction, however infinitésimal, which éludes ail attempts at analysis ; and this indefinable fraction, this residuum of pure and abstract liberty, not to be expressed in terms of time and space, increases in strict ratio to the man^s originality ; and what is true of an individual applies equally to a race or historié period. The bushmen of Australia fiall more readily into the catégories of Taine than the Greeks of the âge of Pericles.

Taine has succeeded admirably in his English Literature in marking the main characteristics of an epoch, in foUowing out the great streams of tendency, in noting interactions and interdependencies. He has been less successful in rendering the peculiar originality of single writers. It is but natural that he should hâve failed most signally in trying to apply his method to the suprême originality of Shakespere. We may object to Taine's attempt to confine the genius of Shakespere in a formula as he would a chemical gas, even though we may not, like Matthew Arnold, see in Shakespere one who " out-tops knowledge," even as a mountain, which

" Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, Spares but the cloudy border of his base To the foil'd searching of mortality."

The era of scientific positivism, of which Taine is one of the chief représentatives, seems at présent to be drawing to a close. The protest against quantitative psychology which was made half a century ago by a few idealists like Emerson, is being echoed at présent by the more thoughtful of the expérimental psychologists themselves. " There is no measurement of psychical facts," says Professor Miinsterberg in a récent article,^ and he adds that " the real psychical facts cannot be anything else than a world of qualities.'' The way is thus prepared for a return to methods in psychology which the positivist has scorned as mediseval — in any case for a reaction against

1 Essay on Expérience.

* The Danger of Expérimental Psychology t Atlantic Monthiy, Feb , 1898.

THE METHOD OF TAINE, îx

the theory which would reduce everything to a "problem of mechanics." ^

However, our ipipatience at the exaggerated determinism of Taine and his disciples should be tempered by the reflection that it was perhaps only a necessary recoil from an equal exaggeration in the opposite direction. Mediaeval religion tended to isolate man entirely from nature and from his fellows, to raise him above time and space, and to regard him as entirely dépendent upon divine grâce and his own free will. The saint strove to attain perfection by the repression of ail the natural instincts. The extravagances of the romances of chivalry which Cervantes satirized are only another expression of this cuit of the heroic personality in défiance of ail the limitations of the real. Taine, on the contrary, has devoted extraordinary powers of analysis to showing the manifold ways in which the individual will is limited and conditioned by natural law, and to demonstrating how " every living thing is held in the iron grasp of necessity." ^ He also undertakes to prove that man is circumscribed in his institutions no less than as an individual by this natural necessity; thèse, too, are histôrical products, largely related to their surroundings, and to be modified, if at ail, only by slow process of évolution. He is, therefore, perfectly logical in his attack upon the French Révolution ; * for at bottom the revolutionary spirit is only a transformation of the old idealism and its misapplication to politics. The Jacobin like the mediseval doctor substitutes an idéal entity for living, breathing men, lets formulas come between himself and direct contact with reality, and believes of human institutions as his mediaeval predecessor had believed of individuals, that they may be recreated with référence to an abstract model by a mère fiât of the will. To the psychologist Robespierre is hardly less mediseval in his mental habit than Joseph de Maistre.^

Naturalism has thus worked a far-reaching transformation in ail

^ Introduction^ p. 34, " Il n'y a ici comme partout qu'un problème de mécanique."

* Litt, ang.t v, p. 4x1.

^ In Us Origines de la France contemporaine.

^ Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), the champion and apologist of Catholicism. Alfred de Vigny has drawn the parallel between de Maistre and Robespierre in Stello^ and has contrasted their mental attitude with that of the analyst.