54 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



Taine makes clear that, in stressing the importance of abstrac- 

 tion, he does not mean to deny the necessity of experience. 

 Rather: 'There are two operations, experience and abstraction; 

 there are two kingdoms, that of complex facts, and that of simple 

 elements. The first is the effect, the second is the cause. The first 

 is contained in the second, and is deduced from it, as a consequent 

 from its principle. The two are equivalent, they are one and the 

 same thing considered under two aspects. This magnificent 

 moving universe, this tumultuous chaos of mutually dependent 

 events, this incessant life, infinitely varied and multiplied, may be 

 all reduced to a few elements and their relations. Our whole 

 efforts result in passing from one to the other, from the complex 

 to the simple, from facts to laws, from experiences to formulae.' ^i 

 The concluding sections of this essay amount, in fact, to a defence 

 of metaphysics, in general, and an empirical metaphysics, in 

 particular: '. . . however limited the field of a mind be, it contains 

 absolute truths; that is, such that there is no object from which 

 they could be absent. And this must necessarily be so; for the more 

 general a fact is, the fewer objects need we examine to meet with 

 it. If it is universal, we meet with it everywhere; if it is absolute, 

 we cannot escape meeting it. That is why, in spite of the narrow- 

 ness of our experience, metaphysics, I mean the search for first 

 causes, is possible, but on condition that we remain at a great 

 height, that we do not descend into details, that we consider only 

 the most simple elements of existence, and the most general 

 tendencies of nature.' ^^ What follows contains many echoes of 

 Hegel (including a footnote quoting the phrase, 'Die aufgehobene 

 Quantitat'), but concludes by speaking of the possibility of 

 sketching 'a system of metaphysics without encroaching on the 

 positive sciences. . . .'^3 



Taine Replies to Critics of ^Abstraction' 



As has already been noted, ^^^ Taine conceived the peculiar 

 function of French philosophy as that of a mediator between the 

 extremes of the British and the Germans: 'We have extended the 

 English ideas in the eighteenth century; and now we can, in the 

 nineteenth, add precision to German ideas. Our business is to 

 restrain, to correct, to complete the two types of mind, one by the 

 other, to combine them together, to express their ideas in a style 

 generally understood, and thus to produce from them the uni- 

 versal mind.' 35 This point was also developed in prefaces which 



