THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CORE: MASTER FACULTY 115 



Despite what seemed like a side-tracking of his major interest, 

 Taine thought of all his more popular works as so many specific 

 applications of method by means of which he would gain a wider 

 audience for his more general philosophy. He wrote in the Preface 

 to On Intelligence (December, 1869): 'For fifteen years I have 

 contributed to these special and concrete psychologies; I now 

 attempt general and abstract psychology. '^ Thus, his criticism 

 never lost its central psychological orientation: La Fontaine was 

 treated as giving poetical expression to 'The Gallic Spirit' in the 

 seventeenth century; Livy, as a Roman patriot with oratorical 

 gifts; and so forth. In the words of the History^ literature reveals 

 men, 'visible' and 'invisible', and through them 'the psychology of 

 a people'. 



Combine the notions of psychology and 'dominance' and all 

 the essentials of 'la faculte maitresse' are present. 10 However, 

 Taine first uses the phrase itself in the 'Preface' to the Essay on 

 Livy (1856): 'Is there in us a master faculty, whose uniform action is 

 imparted diflferently to our diflferent wheels, and which impresses 

 on our machine a necessary system of foreseen movements?' 11 

 The plan for the Treatise on Knowledge has the phrase 'the fixed 

 tendency'. 12 In the concluding chapter 'On Method' of The 

 Classic Philosophers (1856), Taine writes that 'all the parts of its 

 institutions and all the events of its history derive from the master 

 faculty of a people'A^ A number of the figures whom Taine treated 

 in The Classic Philosophers were psychologists, and it is in the 

 chapter on Royer-Collard that we find the first statement of 

 Taine's central psychological thesis, namely, that 'External per- 

 ception is a true hallucination\'^^ 



Though the phrase, 'master faculty', does not occur in the 

 'Introduction' to the History, that essay does refer to 'fundamental 

 faculties' and uses such rough equivalents as 'primitive disposition' 

 and 'general traits'. i^ Despite the fact that most readers associate 

 the 'Introduction' primarily with the Race-Environment-Time 

 formula, it both begins and concludes with an emphasis on mental 

 phenomena: 'So, if we arrange tht psychological map of the events 

 and sensations of a human civilization, we find first of all five or 

 six well-defined provinces — religion, art, philosophy, the state, 

 the family, the industries . . .'. i^ Thus, all of the complex historical 

 facts whose relations Taine is seeking come to a focus in the central 

 fact of psychology. 



