PROBLEMS OF ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 139 



poet as abnormal and 'possessed', to complement the poet as normal and 

 'maker' (Wellek and Warren, p. 79). Consider, for example, his discussion of 

 Shakespeare as 'a nature poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to reason by the 

 sudden revelations of its seer's madness' {History of English Literature, I, 341 fif.). 

 But then, in these respects, Shakespeare, for Taine, was typical of the Eliza- 

 bethan age! 



21 Essais, p. 206. Taine writes here of a combination of 'chance' and neces- 

 sity: 'His favour and his disgrace, his education and his temper, his virtues and 

 his faults had brought him there. Thus are great men born, through chance and 

 necessity, like the rivers, when the accidents of the soil and its slopes reunite all 

 its streams into one channel' {ibid., p. 216, our italics). 



22 See our Chapter II, 'Spinoza versus Hegel'. 



23 For examples of these recent dialectical tendencies, see 'A Note on 

 Methods of Analysis', in Herbert J. Muller's Science and Criticism: The Human- 

 istic Tradition in Contemporary Thought, pp. 50-56, which develops Kenneth 

 Burke's 'perspective by incongruity'; and William Empson, Seven Types of 

 Ambiguity. 



24 Cf. our Chapter V, '"Macaulay" and "Carlyle"'. 



25 See Mill's A System of Logic, Chapter X, Book III, 'Of Plurality of Causes: 

 and of the Intermixture of Effects'; and Taine's essay on Mill: 'We can now 

 comprehend the value and meaning of that axiom of causation which governs 

 all things, and which Mill has mutilated' {History of English Literature, II, 

 614). 



26 A History of Psychology (Vol. Ill, Modern Psychology), p. 262. Brett's 

 qualification (to the effect 'that Taine was not fully emancipated' from 

 rationalism) is a negative way of doing justice to his subject. 'Anti-rationalistic' 

 would be a queer adjective to apply to the author of On Intelligence, who 

 inherits the traditions of Condillac and Spinoza! Consider his affinities with 

 such twentieth-century rationalists as Ernst Cassirer and Morris R. Cohen 

 (Chapter XI, below); and Henri Peyre, who writes of 'the rigidly dogmatic 

 and rationalist criticism . . . from Taine to Faguet . . .' ('Literature and 

 Philosophy in Contemporary France', an essay in Northrop's Ideological 

 Differences and World Order which begins with a quote from Taine: 'Beneath every 

 literature there is a philosophy', pp. 269, 281). Taine was very much interested 

 in irrational phenomena, but his method was never anti-rationalist. 



27 Psychology, p. 353. 



28 Ibid., p. 355, James' emphasis. 



29 Note that in Appendix E the relations have been reversed, for diagram- 

 matic purposes, and the Master Faculty is pictured at the base of the pyramid. 



30 Thus, a pervasive tendency towards pluralism does not eliminate either 

 XhG possibility of ultimate unification or the problem of which factors in an analysis 

 are important, and which trivial. 



Herbert J. Muller's Science and Criticism, an informed, sensitive, and critical 

 survey of the current situation, finds that 'the trend in scientific thought is 

 indicated by the constant recurrence of such terms as "continuity", "evolution", 

 "inter-relation", "integration", "system", "field", "pattern" — all summed up 

 in the concept of dynamic, organic wholes' (p. 241). Since 'the "cause" is 

 finally the whole situation', a new approach to the problem of freedom has 

 been attempted. In France, the generation which matured under Taine's 



