CULTURAL FACTORS: ENVIRONMENT AND TIME 109 



the feeling for history as to know that it could not be reduced to a 

 given number of separate elements with quite the absolutism of 

 chemistry. And it was perhaps out of remorse for his over-generous 

 endorsement of the parallel between natural and social sciences 

 that Taine introduced the temporal element along with race and 

 milieu, thereby saving something of the rights of history. Le 

 moment is not superfluous in Taine's system, but represents a 

 recognition of the necessity to take into account the imponder- 

 able.'43 



But the point which Taine is making is far from 'imponderable'. 

 The whole is greater than the sum of its parts : water is different 

 from the mechanical addition of H2 and O, consisting precisely 

 in the two elements plus that total relationship which constitutes 

 its 'waterhood'. Professor Rice dismisses the idea of 'momentum' 

 ('the point of development at which the work or the people studied 

 has arrived at a given moment') very briefly as 'the temporal con- 

 notation again'. '^'^ But it is temporal in a sense different from the 

 first one mentioned: whereas the notion of 'epoch' is discrete and 

 discontinuous, the second sense of moment emphasizes continuity of 

 development. 



Though the word 'momentum' comes from physics — and, like 

 milieu, points to Taine's background in eighteenth-century New- 

 tonian science — it has a cultural meaning which is clear enough. 

 Thus, 'among several diflferences there is this, that the one artist 

 is the precursor, the other the successor'. ^5 In other words, 'Cul- 

 ture is historical: the present exists only in its relation with the 

 past.''^^ Professor Guerard has clarified this ambiguity o^ moment 

 by translating it, rather awkwardly, as 'the moment' and distin- 

 guishing two senses, those of 'time' and 'tradition'. ^ 7 We have 

 found it more felicitous to use 'time' — 'history' would also be 

 accurate — as the more general word, since that is the basic con- 

 cept involved in moment. 'Period' or 'epoch' would then be the 

 proper terms to use for Time when considered as discrete; 'tradi- 

 tion' or 'movement' (as in 'the Romantic movement'), for Time 

 when considered as continuous and cumulative. 



Both these uses of Time can be illustrated from the Lectures on 

 Art. In The Philosophy of Art in the Netherlands, Part II divides the 

 history of art in those countries into four 'Historic Epochs' in an 

 attempt to prove the 'general correspondence between art and 

 milieu.' "^^ Presumably Race and Environment are more stable or 



