PROBLEMS OF ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 127 



perceived that the entire doctrine of "Substitution" so clearly set 

 forth in the nominalistic beginning of his brilliant book is utterly 

 senseless except on the supposition of realistic principles like those 

 which he so admirably expounds at its close? How can the image 

 be a useful substitute for the sensation, the tendency for the 

 image, the name for the tendency, unless sensation, image, ten- 

 dency, and name be identical in some respect, in respect namely 

 of function, of the relations they enter into? Were this realistic 

 basis laid at the outset of Taine's De V Intelligence, it would be one 

 of the most consistent instead of one of the most self-contradictory 

 works of our day.'i^ 



Whether or not Taine is consistent or self-contradictory, it is 

 obviously because, rightly or wrongly, he had a vision of the unity 

 of the Real and the Ideal, developed in his concluding chapter on 

 *The Connection of General Characters, or the Explanatory 

 Reason of Things', that he tended to merge his external with his 

 internal analyses. ^^ Hence, 



'By means of existing records, and by the exact processes of 

 methodical reconstruction, we are at present able to suppress the 

 distance of time so as to represent to ourselves by more or less 

 numerous specimens, the Frenchman or Englishman of the 

 seventeenth century or of the Middle Ages, the ancient Roman 

 and even the Hindoo of the Buddhist epoch, to picture to our- 

 selves his life, private, public, industrial, agricultural, political, 

 religious, philosophical, literary, in short, to construct the descrip- 

 tive psychology of his moral and mental state and the circumstan- 

 tial analysis of his physical and social medium, then, to pass from 

 these elements to still simpler elements, to discern the aptitudes 

 and tendencies which were found effective and preponderant in 

 all the processes of his mind and heart, to note the general con- 

 ceptions which determined every detail of his ideas, to mark the 

 general inclinations which determined the directions of all his 

 actions; in short, to distinguish the primordial forces which, 

 present and in action at each moment of the life of each individual, 

 impress on the total group, that is to say on the society and the 

 age, the characters which observation has recognized there.' ^'^ 



A footnote adds: 'I have attempted to apply this method in many 

 historical essays, and have explained it in the preface to "Essais 

 de Critique et d'Histoire," and in that to "Histoire de la Lit- 

 ter ature Anglaise".' 



