CULTURAL FACTORS: ENVIRONMENT AND TIME 103 



Renaissance, we presumably find that the people and their geo- 

 graphical milieu were not radically changed in the millennium 

 which intervened 2; the basic difference is one of 'state policy' or 

 political organization. Other circumstances mentioned are 'social 

 conditions', such as were introduced by the rise of Christianity. 

 Phrases and examples used are various: 'prolonged situations', 

 'surrounding circumstances', 'persistent and gigantic pressures'; 

 the struggle with the Moslems in Spain, political struggles in 

 England, the Catholic Church in France. Taine is concerned here 

 with those causes which 'are to nations what education, career, 

 condition, abode, are to individuals', all those powers 'by which 

 the external acts on the internal' ^ — in brief, what we have come to 

 sum up under the term Environment. 



The third set of causes considered by Taine is a bit more 

 difficult to define: 'with the forces within and without, there 

 is the work which they have already produced together, and this 

 work itself contributes to produce that which follows.'"^ Thus, 

 artists are influenced by their predecessors, representing 'different 

 steps' in a 'progressive development', which together create 'great 

 historical currents' characterized by 'internal concords or con- 

 trarieties' . ^ These elements, though vaguely resembling those 

 already characterized as Environment, seem to be distinguished 

 from the latter chiefly by their dynamism, their cumulative 

 nature, their 'momentum' — they all include terms involving the 

 concept of Time. 



Many critics, both impressed and perplexed by this distinction, 

 have asked with Professor Guerard: 'Where does environment give 

 place to timeT^ By examining these terms more closely, as they 

 are actually used by Taine, we may perhaps hope to understand 

 what he intended them to mean. 



Environment: ^milieu' 



Leo Spitzer's 'historical semantic' investigation is an excellent 

 introduction to the manifold connotations of the term 'milieu'. 

 As he points out, the idea is an ancient one: in Taine's immediate 

 tradition, it is found in Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws^ but an 

 intimate relationship between the lives of men and their 'ambient' 

 surroundings was fully recognized by the Greeks; Hippocrates, 

 as a doctor, thought especially of the air men breathe, "^ but this 

 was readily enlarged to include other elements of climate. In 

 Aristotle, and others, we find the idea that everything has its 



