CRITIQUE OF ABSTRACTION 49 



It was in such an atmosphere that Cousin's eclecticism was born, 

 and it was because it met the needs of a pubHc so nurtured that it 

 succeeded. 



In view of the great emphasis which Taine has placed here, 

 both on the dangers of abstraction and on the equivocations or 

 ambiguities of which he finds Jouflfroy and Cousin guilty, it is 

 curious to note his own tendency to use the word 'abstraction' 

 ambiguously. Thus, in the early chapters, it is clearly being used as 

 a term of negative criticism, whereas in the concluding chapter 

 (M. Paul's discussion) and elsewhere it is made an important, 

 indeed the central, part of his critical method. How can we resolve 

 this seeming contradiction? Is the word being used differently in 

 each context? 



Abstraction as Weakness 



If we look both before and after the writing of The Classic 

 Philosophers^ we shall find that these conflicting attitudes towards 

 abstraction represent two emphases in what Taine considered to 

 be a unitary method. A few years previous, during the period when 

 he had been writing his La Fontaine and Livy, he had himself 

 stressed the importance of abstraction from particulars in litera- 

 ture and history. Thus, on the first page of the first edition of La 

 Fontaine he announced that his goal was 'to find the universal 

 traits of beauty' by 'collecting the particular beauties of each 

 fable'. '7 An application of this method to literary study took the 

 form of resumes^ as was evident in the advice he sent to his sister 

 Sophie from Nevers: 'This is the manner of study which Sophie 

 needs: Sum up her author. — Sum up her summary. — Sum up 

 her second summary in four or five lines. '^ This advice was 

 repeated a year later from Paris: '. . . you would need to make 

 summaries for your history. . . . That would serve at once as an 

 acquirement of memory and of reasoning. . . .Tell me if you are 

 making the tabular summaries of which I have spoken to you.'^ 

 This was more than the pedagogy oi th.& precis for Taine: it was an 

 essential part of his concept of scientific method. 



Taine's critique of abstraction can be understood as part of his 

 general attempt to counteract some of the tendencies of a classical 

 training and a rationalistic heritage in philosophy. His desire to 

 make the transition from a deductive to an inductive method is 

 brought out with special clarity in the revisions for the third 

 edition o^ La Fontaine, which were made in 1861, the same year 



S.A.J.— 4 



