VI INTRODUCTION

hérissée de rochers, toujours battue par les orages. On y connaît à peine le soleil; les fleurs sont les mousses marines, les algues et les coquillages coloriés qu'on trouve au fond .des baies solitaires. Les nuages y paraissent sans couleur, et la joie même y est im peu triste; mais des fontaines d'eau froide y sortent du rocher, et les yeux des jeunes filles y sont comme ces vertes fontaines où, sur des fonds d'herbes ondulées, se mire le ciel."

The influence of this early environment and discipline remained ineffaceably imprinted on Renan's nature, moulding him into a vaguely ecclesiastic savant and a méditative and severely sober artist.

From thèse peaceful and congenial surroundings, Renan, having resolved to enter on the priestly career, was, for purposes of théologie study, suddenly transplanted into the feverishly intellectual atmosphère of Paris, into an atmosphère of science and of criticism, into a totally new world, one living under the domination of the least spiritual of ail disciplines, the worship of mère, cold, positivistic truth. Renan gradually found himself traversing a painful crisis, a deadly struggle between his mediaeval culture and modem thought. His sister Henriette, who had already passed through the same expérience, was at this time his chief spiritual support. She recalls Sainte-Beuve's theory that the sisters of great men are often more exquisite and perfect embodiments than their brothers

INTRODUCTION Vil

of those very qualities in which the greatness of the latter is found. In 1845 Renan disinterestedly renounced the career that lay* open to him, brought his theological studies to an abrupt end, and found himself, adrift, alone and unprepared, in the world of Paris. He had definitely outgrown Catholicism; his belief in dogma and in supematuralism had irrevocably erumbled away at the contact of Hegelian philosophy, of historieal criticism and of science. From this time, after a few years of obscure and laborious drudgery, until his death in 1892, he led the quiet, independent life of the man of letters and the scholar, varied by occasional scientific missions and by his teaching in the Collège de France, His first important work was U Avenir de la Science (1848, though published only in 1890), in which ail his former ardor seems to hâve been transferred, uncooled and undiminished, to his new religion, the cuit of science, of a "sacred curiosity." However, this was but a second stage in Renan's development. His belief in the vast possibilities and the humane efficacy of science gradu.ally gave way to a more permanent mood of growing scepticism. Similarly his faith in human perfectibility, his momentary démocratie and humanitarian illusions gave way to a rather disdainful and very aristocratie distrust of democracy. However, the scientific temper, the scientific method, something even of the dogmatism of the scientist, remained permanently characteristic of Renan, just as the

Vm INTRODUCTION

influence of his earlier religions expériences survived in the vague perfume of spirituality that permeates his whole work. Of a délicate and almost femininely impressible nature, he nevertheless accepts as his suprême guide that most masculine faculty, the pure intelligence, curiously combining

All-comprehensive tenderness, All-subtilizing intellect.

Essentially idealistic and spiritual, he accepts ail the limitations of positivism. Haunted by the splendid visions and the far-reaching intuitions of the religions spirit, he holds that the limits of our real knowledge are the narrow ones set by reason and observation. Setting down the search for truth as the noblest of human pursuits, and its achievement as the highest of human satisfactions, he yet ends by professing himself frankly unable to affirm anything. Animated by a moral fervor, in which one can even detect a remuant of ecclesiastic unction, his theory of morals at one moment strays far over the confines of hedonism, at another loses ail consistency of outline in a haze of pure relativity. Thèse remoter excursions represent, however, a third phase of Renan's thought, or rather à growingly fréquent mood of his later years, when the two modes of thought, the religions and the scientific, by the neutralizing effect of their graduai interpénétration, cause his philosophy to verge perilously close upon mère dilettanteism, upon an