198 EPILOGUE 



But who ever expected a man, even a scientist, to jump out of his 

 own skin? These Hmitations of personahty, place, and time are 

 such as all flesh is heir to. Perhaps in the case of Taine they made 

 him somewhat less than a truly major figure; but he grappled 

 with great issues, and his problems, and general formulations, 

 tend to date less readily than his particular solutions of them. 



Limitatiofis of Method 



Most important from a long-range point of view, however, are 

 the limitations in the actual development and applications of his 

 method itself, most of which have been touched upon in the course 

 of our critical exposition. Some of these are perhaps inevitable for 

 a philosophical criticism, and others may have been the result of 

 personal and temperamental weaknesses in the man himself 



Among the former may be mentioned: his tendencies towards 

 abstraction, deductive method, jumping to conclusions, abuse of 

 analogy, and neglect of the work of art. None of these are fatal; 

 all are to some extent inevitable; and Taine's degree of fallibility 

 on these scores varies from occasion to occasion. Thus, if men 

 wish to generalize at all, some abstraction is necessary. As to the 

 element of deduction, even the sciences have given up Bacon's 

 ideal of perfect induction, and, especially in aesthetic criticism, 

 it is hard to conceive of a critic proceeding to analyse — even look 

 at a painting or read a book — without some hypothesis already in 

 mind, some notion of what to look for. Any mind that reaches a 

 conclusion must make Sijump somewhere; but Taine was especially 

 guilty in this respect because he liked to see his facts fit into neat 

 and coherent logical systems. 12 Use of analogy is natural enough 

 in discussions of literature and art, which are filled with meta- 

 phors and symbols, but Taine overdid his fondness for seeing men 

 as 'seeds' and paintings as 'flowers', because of his tendency 

 towards monism, towards seeing all kinds and levels of phenomena 

 as expressions of universal biological and psychological laws. 

 Finally, short of telling the reader simply to read the poem and 

 look at the painting, a critic must inevitably leave the work of art 

 behind at times. Still, Taine's historical emphasis led him to 

 extremes in his neglect of aesthetic form.i^ 



Other, more personal, limitations in his method, most of them 

 springing from his preference for Spinoza over Hegel, or from the 

 struggle between the two philosophies in his mind, include his 

 tendencies towards mechanism, towards a static logic, towards a 



