i8 THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



But a year at the Normal School broadened his horizons. Writing 

 on 20 March 1849 he still placed philosophy first, but literature, 

 history, and the sciences were also mentioned: 'All that advances 

 abreast, and I always have a quantity of things on hand; I have 

 made for myself a grand plan of study, and I am reserving these 

 three years at the Normal School in order to realize it in part.' 29 

 Because of lack of time and the pressures of the academic cur- 

 riculum, he felt he would have to postpone till after graduation 

 from Normal School much-desired studies in 'the social sciences, 

 political economy, and the physical sciences'. ^o Though he was to 

 have no serious contact with the positivist philosophy until about 

 a decade later, there was a strong scientific bent in the young 

 student already, ^i 



Taine's transition to empiricism required both metaphysical 

 and methodological criticisms of the rationalist tradition. The 

 former were expressed in papers on the Spinozist and Cartesian 

 proofs of God's existence (the ontological argument), in which 

 Taine (i) questioned whether a merely logical definition could 

 lead to statements concerning existence or causation; and 

 (2) distinguished between the static nature of Spinoza's Substance 

 and a more dynamic, Hegelian concept of Infinity. On the 

 methodological problem, (3) he came to distinguish sharply 

 between the processes o^ perception and conception.^^ 



It was in the light of this last distinction, especially, that Taine 

 spent ensuing years hammering out his own conception of scien- 

 tific method in science and in criticism. Despite these criticisms, 

 however, there was a permanent residue of Spinozism in all his 

 later thinking. Though his concept of science changed, it was to 

 Spinoza (as well as Descartes) that he owed both the precept and 

 an example of the application of a 'scientific' method to moral 

 subject matter. Spinoza's 'intellectual love of God' remained his 

 life-long religion: 'My God has nothing in common with the 

 butcher-God of Christianity, nor the man-God of the philosophers 

 of the second rank.' 33 Spinoza's rigorous determinism, according 

 to which only God is completely free because only He exists 

 from the necessity of His own nature and 'Nothing in the universe 

 is contingent', 34 was surely in the background of Taine's concern 

 with the problem of causation. Last, but not least, he found in 

 Spinoza the first formulation of the postulate which, by synthe- 

 sizing the best elements of Realism and Idealism, was to provide 

 the cornerstone of his system, namely, that 'The order and 



