SCIENCE VERSUS CRITICISM? 9 



extent of the change, which was one of emphasis rather than basic 

 philosophy or method. 



These varied criticisms of Taine, which could easily be multi- 

 plied, have been chosen chiefly to illustrate the charges of dualism, 

 since the general direction of the remainder of this study will be to 

 underscore the unity of his thought. Their variety indicates not 

 only that there is a very real problem, but also that Taine's 

 achievement was both important and complex; otherwise he would 

 long since have been relegated either to the dust heap or to a 

 neat little pigeon-hole in the history of criticism. The extent to 

 which his ideas have served as a call to critical battles may be 

 indicative, further, not so much of confusions in Taine as of 

 diversities among his critics: the positivists find him idealist, the 

 idealists find him positivist, and both agree on his 'dualism'. 

 Perhaps it was not Taine, but rather his critics and his decadent 

 environment that were 'tragically torn'. 



A Sketch of Taine's Solution 



What are the essentials of Taine's attempt at a solution of the 

 problem created by the conflict between science and criticism, 

 whose nature and background have been thus briefly stated? 

 A concise formulation of his scientific goal can be found in notes, 

 written in 1858, for a work 'On Laws in History': 



'In other terms, the two great researches are: 



'(i) Given an action, seek the psychological state which is its 

 antecedent; 



'(2) Given a psychological state, seek the psychological and 

 non-psychological conditions which are its antecedent.' ^3 



Included in the connotation of the term 'action', for Taine, were, 

 of course, all the phenomena, 'systems', and 'groups' of facts, as 

 he designates them elsewhere, which are mentioned in the 

 'Introduction' to the History of English Literature: religion, litera- 

 ture, music, art, and philosophy; the family and the state; science, 

 statecraft, agriculture, and industry — in other words, culture, in 

 the broadest, anthropological sense. 



In his use of this complex stuflf of history, Taine tried to strike a 

 happy medium between the extreme positions of idealism and 

 materialism and to maintain that non-reductive fullness of 

 perspective which has been the goal of naturalists down the 

 ages. Starting and ending in the spirit of Spinoza's proposition 



