FORMATION OF A METHOD (1828-1852) 17 



predict their energy and calculate their good and their bad effects 

 in advance? Can one reconstruct them, just as the naturalists 

 reconstruct a fossilized animal? Is there in us a master faculty 

 whose uniform action is imparted differently to our different 

 wheels, and which impresses on our machine a necessary system 

 of foreseen movements? 



'I should like to answer yes, and by means of an example. '22 



Victor Giraud characterized Taine as 'a Spinozist more sym- 

 pathetic to experience than his master', 23 and saw the unity of his 

 work as deriving from its foundation in Spinoza's metaphysics. 

 Like so many others in the nineteenth century, Taine found in 

 Spinoza not only an example of rational and scientific method, 

 but also a pantheistic solution of his religious problem, which 

 helps account for the intensity of his devotion to the philosophy of 

 the Ethics. '2-'^ 



Critique of the Rationalist Tradition: Spinoza and Descartes 



However, though Spinoza's philosophy was an early, profound, 

 and persistent influence on Taine's thought, he did not accept 

 it without criticism; such was not his way. Thus, in answer to a 

 letter in which Prevost-Paradol had written: T am going to read 

 Spinoza who, it seems to me, is your master . . .', he wrote, on 

 30 March, 1849: 'He is only halfway my master. I believe that he 

 is wrong on several fundamental questions.' ^5 As the author of 

 Taine's Life and Letters wrote, referring to the student papers which 

 survive from his second year at the Normal School: '. . . one feels 

 that in that period he was still completely steeped in his readings 

 of Spinoza and Descartes; but one sees his effort to disentangle 

 a personal doctrine and to arrive at new methods'. ^6 



These new methods resulted from attempts to combine elements 

 in Spinoza with 'science', used in its broadest sense, to include 

 metaphysics as well as the 'moral sciences' of psychology and 

 history. 27 While still in Bourbon College, Taine had been con- 

 cerned with method, convinced that the mathematical rationalism 

 of Descartes and Spinoza was sufficient: 



'I saw the point towards which I should carry all my research. 

 Moreover, I was in possession of the method; I had studied it out 

 of curiosity and for amusement. Since then I have set to work with 

 ardour; the clouds were scattered; I understood the origin of my 

 errors; I perceived the train of thought and the whole.'^s 



S.A.J.— 2 



