40 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



Basically, the book was an essay on method, and its central 

 theme was the importance of analysis as a means of applying 

 scientific method to philosophy as well as, by implication, to 

 literature and the arts: 'To experiment, to analyze the ideas and 

 judgments acquired by means of experience — method is nothing 

 more than that.'^ Analysis was the great need of the hour, the 

 necessary procedure which followers of Victor Cousin's eclecti- 

 cism had neglected; supplemented by synthetic methods of 'con- 

 struction' and utilizing to the full man's powers of abstraction, 

 it would enable philosophy in France to achieve that balanced 

 view which represented Taine's conception of true science. 



Taine had long been aware of the possibilities of two kinds of 

 method. A passage, later suppressed, near the beginning of the 

 original text of La Fontaine, considered possible ways of coming to 

 understand the nature of poetic fables: 'We can . . . towards this 

 end use two methods: the very short one of construction, 

 establishing first the nature of poetry, will infer therefrom what 

 the poetic fable ought to be; the other very long one of analysis, 

 decomposing the fables of the poet, will deduce thereby what 

 poetry is.''^ One was deductive, proceeding from the universal to 

 the particular; the other was inductive, proceeding from the parti- 

 cular to the universal. Though the issue had been implicit in 

 Taine's writings from the first, it was crystallized in the chapters 

 'On Method', at the end of The Classic Philosophers, which first 

 appeared as articles entitled 'Analysis' and 'System'. There he 

 dramatized the two emphases by associating them with two per- 

 sonality types: M. Pierre, a precise person whose favourite haunts 

 are the Botanical Gardens and Medical School, is the spokesman 

 for analysis; M. Paul, whose eyes are 'full of penetration and 

 ardour' and whose words are 'elevated and passionate', ^ is a 

 reader of Spinoza and Hegel and an advocate of system and 

 synthesis. These represent two aspects of Taine's own personality 

 and interests, and presumably the ideal critic, for him, would be 

 one who combined the best features of both. 



The Method of Analysis 



The first step in M. Pierre's method of analysis, which Taine 

 refers back to Condillac's Langue des calculs, is translation of 

 'signs' — i.e., words and other symbols — into 'distinct facts': 'In 

 this translation I see two steps. The first is the exact translation: 

 it is the one which the doctrine of Condillac expounds; the second 



