HISTORY AND PSYCHOLOGY 69 



The essay on Carlyle, which appears in the History under the 

 heading of 'Philosophy and History', was written shortly before 

 the companion essay on Mill and also stresses the importance of 

 'abstraction'. The facts of Carlyle's biography, as well as the 

 nature of his thought, led Taine to contrast him with Macaulay, 

 stressing his affinities with the Germans, rather than the French. 

 An entire section (V) of the part on his 'Style and Mind' is a short 

 essay on method, developing the familiar concepts of the group 

 and the type. 



At the expense of verification and proof, Carlyle proceeded 

 by intuition: this 'power of discovering general ideas' ^"^ had been 

 the special contribution of Germany during the fruitful years from 

 1780 to 1830, and it was Carlyle's vocation to translate some of 

 that contribution into English. Two names (Goethe and Hegel) 

 and two key ideas {Entwickelung and Begriff) are especially men- 

 tioned. 55 When this method is carried to excess, 'we must have 

 recourse either to hypothesis or abstraction, invent arbitrary 

 explanations, or be lost in vague ones . . . the two vices which 

 have corrupted German thought'. 56 ('Arbitrary' and 'vague' are 

 the words to be underlined here, since Taine repeatedly stresses 

 the importance of both 'hypothesis' and 'abstraction' himself) 

 Taine argues for a balance between, in this case, 'the gravity of 

 the Puritans' and 'the gaiety of Voltaire' : 'Goethe, the master of 

 all modern minds, knew well how to appreciate both.' 57 At this 

 point, since he is trying to explain a German mind from England 

 to a French reading public, Taine takes the extreme relativist 

 position — as he had in some of the Essays^^: 'The best fruit of 

 criticism is to detach ourselves from ourselves . . . and perhaps 

 one day free ourselves from every system.' 59 Again, with special 

 reference to Carlyle's Cromwell, he stresses the centrality of 

 psychology: 'To explain a revolution, is to write a partial 

 psychology. . . .'^o 



Freedom in History? 



If Taine's philosophy of history has placed psychology and the 

 notion of causation at its centre, what provision, if any, has been 

 made for freedom of the will? This question had been so fre- 

 quently raised that, when the second edition of the Essays 

 appeared, Taine found it necessary to write a second 'Preface' 

 to clarify the issue. Giraud notes that, when this second 

 version was printed as an article in the Journal des Debats 



