48 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



response by an involuntary equivocation,'^ and arrested it on the 

 threshold, because of a theological prejudice from which he never 

 escaped. 



'This taste for abstractioji persuaded M. de Biran to transform 

 forces, simple qualities or abstract analogies, into substances, to 

 consider the will as the soul, to change extension into an appear- 

 ance, and to revive Leibnitz's monads. 



'This taste for abstraction, after having led M. Cousin into 

 pantheism, reduced his philosophy to a heap of inexact phrases, 

 of lame reasonings and of obvious equivocations, so that when the 

 love of the seventeenth century had taught him a simple style, at 

 a later stage, his doctrines no longer had any other support than 

 public prejudice, his glory as a philosopher, and his genius as an 

 orator. 



'This taste for abstraction, after having led M. Jouffroy astray 

 among M. de Biran's monads, led him to consider the faculties as 

 real things, actual objects of psychology; to imprison psychology 

 in a question of scholastic and useless words; to express the facts 

 by vague notations, inexact in themselves and laden with errors.' ^ 



The remainder of this concluding chapter stressed the impact 

 of these two 'dominant traits' on Taine's chief concern, the 

 relation of science to the humanities, or 'moral sciences'. The result 

 of the tendencies towards abstractions and towards the sub- 

 ordination of science to morals had been an isolated and impotent 

 philosophy. Instead of leading in the search for knowledge, the 

 'spiritualists' had remained divorced from the positive sciences, 

 progress in which at that time was being made by leaps and 

 bounds. In this respect, Taine contrasted them to the 'ideologues' 

 of the eighteenth century, who had been the spiritual sons — as 

 well as, in some respects, the leaders — of Newtonian science. He 

 pictured a pendulum-swing from one extreme to the other: with 

 Laromiguiere, analysis had ceased to be a discovery, and in the 

 chaos and servitude of the Napoleonic Era, 'it was an honour, a 

 virtue, a refuge, and a rebellion to dream'. Llowever, 'for the 

 first time in the world, dreaming was metaphysics'. "^ Dreams and 

 abstractions were the chief passions of the Romantic period ('our 

 renaissance'): 'Everywhere one saw metaphor and abstraction, 

 poetry and philosophy, dream and formula, intermingled. . . . 

 Plays and novels became manuals of science. . . .'^ Not only did 

 poets become philosophers and saviours of humanity, but philo- 

 sophers put their theories into novels, odes, prayers, and ecstasies. "^ 



