lo THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



(Proposition VII, Part II, of the Ethics) that 'The order and con- 

 nection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas,' 

 it seemed natural to him that psychology, treated both as effect and 

 as cause, should be his central concern, since he was applying 

 scientific method to the 'moral sciences' or humanities. 



The first of the two lines of research mentioned indicates the 

 first step in Taine's studies of literature, art, or history: starting 

 from the cultural, contextual facts (poems, paintings, philosophies, 

 movements, institutions), he sought the psychological 'forces', 

 the 'dominant faculties' of the men who had given them birth. 

 This, in scientific dress, was a continuation of the Romantic 

 critic's attempt at an imaginative recreation of the individual 

 experience which brought forth the work of art ('seek the psycho- 

 logical state which is its antecedent'). 



The second line of research found its purest expression in Taine's 

 psychological work [On Intelligence), which sought the causes of 

 conscious states in their antecedent conditions, namely, the body 

 and its nervous system. Its application to literary and artistic 

 study took him far beyond the early Romantics into all the rami- 

 fications of the historical method and led to his familiar formula 

 of 'la race, le milieu, et le moment', which we shall translate as 

 'race, environment, and time' ('the psychological and non- 

 psychological conditions'). 



In terms of this framework, Taine insisted repeatedly that his 

 entire enterprise was a kind of 'applied psychology'. The key to 

 his critical practice was a version of the inductive method which 

 stressed the importance of abstraction. Starting from particular 

 facts, he tried to rise to a level of generalization concerning those 

 facts which approximated the laws of science. 



Finally, and this is central to the point at issue, since both lines 

 of research revealed the essential causes of the works under con- 

 sideration, they would also thereby reveal the relations of those 

 works to the hierarchy of ideal values, which existed for Taine in 

 reality. As we shall see, this was not a late accretion to his way of 

 thinking, but an essential part of his philosophy and method from 

 the start: the more fully a work of art embodied the nature of 

 things, the more closely did it approach the ideal, and the greater 

 was its value. For criticism, therefore, the scientific search for causes and 

 the desire for a standard of judgment were ultimately one. The Romantic 

 was fused with the Classical; scientific (psychological-historical) 

 and judicial criticism met, as in the great example of Aristotle. 



