28 THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



rejection of final causes in nature^i and learned, probably from 

 Hegel as well as from the physical and moral sciences, the im- 

 portance of history and time, or dynamism and growth92; thus 

 he attempted to maintain a position which, like that of Ernst 

 Cassirer,93 gave due recognition to the importance of both struc- 

 ture and function, form and history. He could have derived from 

 both Spinoza and Hegel his vision of totality and unity, which 

 was, after all, also the nineteenth-century ideal of science: 



'It is at this moment that one feels the birth within of the 

 notion of Nature. By means of this hierarchy of necessities, the 

 world constitutes a unique being, indivisible, of which all beings 

 are members. At the supreme summit of things, at the highest 

 point of the luminous and inaccessible ether, the external axiom 

 pronounces itself, and the prolonged reverberation of that creative 

 formula composes, through its inexhaustible undulations, the 

 immensity of the universe. '9'* 



These differences in approach to the nature of reality were 

 associated with a like divergence in theories of causation. Rosea 

 discussed, 95 with nice discrimination, the similarities and differ- 

 ences between Hegel and Taine on the ideas of essence, of sub- 

 stance, and of cause, finding that 'In the main, Taine argues for 

 an idea of causation which is found, to be sure, developed in 

 Hegel's Logic, but which is not Hegel's conception of causation.' ^6 

 He differed radically in his interpretation from those who charac- 

 terized Taine as a positivist: inasmuch as Taine disagreed with 

 Mill on the heterogeneity of cause and effect and the antithesis of 

 thought and existence, he was in the Hegelian (and Spinozist) 

 tradition. ^"7 But 'Taine confused the idea of internal finality with 

 that of efficient causality . . . contrary to Hegel's cause, which is 

 the internal identity of distinct and irreducible terms, Taine's 

 cause supposes only an identity. '^s Identifying the concepts of 

 essence, substance, force, law, and cause, 'Taine is a Spinozist, 

 for all his being inspired by Hegel. '^^ 



Myers states the antitheses, again, as follows: 



'Hegel felt that he had gone beyond Spinoza in three important 

 ways: first, in the realization of freedom in the notion, which is 

 the truth of the necessity appearing in the doctrine of essence; 

 secondly, in the conception of the concrete universal which over- 

 came Spinoza's simple negation of the finite; and thirdly, in the 



