ii6 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



^On Intelligence' 



Unfortunately, the relevance of Taine's work On Intelligence to 

 his philosophy of criticism in general, and to the concept of 

 Master Faculty in particular, is lessened somewhat by the fact 

 that it remained incomplete. The unwritten work On Will, re- 

 ferred to in the Preface, i'' would probably have contained much 

 material more directly applicable to the production of literature 

 and art. Thus, the completed volumes are discussions of 'The 

 Elements of Knowledge' and 'Of the Different Kinds of Know- 

 ledge'; but the original plan had called for supplementing the 

 part on 'Theoretical functions' by one on 'Practical functions or 

 operations by which the idea reproduces itself in reality .''^^ This would 

 have included divisions on 'passion' and 'will', and one of the 

 sections in the latter would have considered 'Pure abstract ideas 

 compared to abstract ideas transformed into metaphors ''^^ Chapters on 

 'The Fixed Tendency' and its influence would have constituted, 

 in effect, detailed treatments of the Master Faculty idea. 



Nor is it our purpose to consider in any detail Taine's position 

 in the development of psychology as such. Here, too, as in so 

 many other fields, he was a pioneer: the development of modern, 

 empirical psychology in France is usually dated from 1870, when 

 Taine's volumes appeared, forming an early link in a chain of 

 works by such distinguished figures as Ribot, Binet, Charcot, 

 Janet, and Freud, who laid the foundations for the science of 

 abnormal psychology. 20 Such topics as his analysis 'Of Sensations', 

 for example, are beyond our present scope. Nevertheless, much in 

 these volumes is directly relevant to our study of his philosophy 

 of criticism. There are frequent references to literature and art, 

 and, despite his concluding claim that he has stopped short 'on 

 the threshold of metaphysics', 21 Taine poured so many of his 

 philosophical reflections into his psychological treatise that it 

 provides an excellent summation of his general position. 



As usual, Taine's procedure is double: the first part is analytic; 

 the second, synthetic. 'The Elements of Knowledge' start by 

 considering 'Signs' (Book I) or names, as in Mill's System of Logic, 

 and pass on to the 'Images' (Book II) for which signs are substi- 

 tutes, paying special attention to the phenomena of hallucination, 

 and picturing a kind of Natural Selection at work: 'So, in the 

 struggle for life, in which all our images are constantly engaged, 

 the one furnished at the outset with most force, retains in each 



