THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CORE: MASTER FACULTY 117 



conflict, by the very law of repetition which gives it being, the 

 capacity of treading down its adversaries. . . .'22 Thus, various 

 faculties may be suppressed, restored, and created: '. . . our 

 images, by connecting themselves, make up the group which in 

 literary and judicial language we call the moral personality'. ^3 

 Images are, in turn, 'reduced' to combinations of elementary 

 'Sensations' (Book III), and finally 'The Physical Conditions of 

 Mental Events' (Book IV) are considered. 



After summarizing what was known in the i86o's of 'The 

 Functions of the Nervous Centres', Taine considers in this con- 

 cluding book of the first part various philosophical hypotheses 

 concerning the relations of nervous functions to mental events, 

 favouring the Spinozist solution of psycho-physical parallelism: 

 'It is possible then that the sensation and the internal movement 

 of the nervous centres may be at bottom one and the same unique 

 event, condemned, by the two ways in which it is known, always 

 and irremediably to appear double.' ^4 Nature is pictured as 

 having two faces, corresponding to Spinoza's attributes of thought 

 and extension, each of which ranges from simple elements to 

 complex states: 'From base to summit, the correspondence on 

 either side is perfect'. ^ 5 Finally, these general ideas are applied to 

 'The Human Person and the Physiological Individual'. 



It is here that we arrive at a discussion of 'faculties' or 'powers' 

 which provides the psychological basis for Taine's doctrine of the 

 Master Faculty. He emphatically disavows any intention of 

 erecting these terms into 'metaphysical entities, pure phantoms, 

 begotten of words . . .'.26 Nevertheless, 'the force is the cause of 

 the event ... it may be compared to an inexhaustible stream, of 

 which the event is a wave'. ^ 7 Nothing exists, i.e. is substantial, 

 but the events themselves: 'The forces, faculties, or powers apper- 

 taining to this web are nothing more . . . than the property which 

 any particular event of the web has of being constantly followed, 

 under various conditions, external or internal, by some particular 

 internal or external event. '^8 There is nothing mysterious or 

 occult about these faculties, which, of course, we discover by 

 methods of scientific analysis and abstraction. Of such stuflf is the 

 Ego, or Self, constructed: as we rise higher in the evolutionary 

 scale, we find that 'just as the nervous apparatus is a system of 

 organs in diflferent states of complication, so the psychological 

 individual would be a system of souls in diflferent degrees of 

 development'. 29 



