2IO APPENDICES 



within it as if within a fortress from which, moreover, he never 

 emerged.*'^ 



Spinoza's influence is especially evident in Taine's 'freshman' 

 letters to his friend and former school-mate at Bourbon College, 

 Lucien Anatole Prevost-Paradol (i 829-1 870), who did not join 

 him at the Normal School until a year later. Taine had found in 

 Spinoza, first, a metaphysics, and second, a method which he 

 thought could lead to certain knowledge. ^ The metaphysics took 

 the form, during those adolescent years, of a vision of perfection 

 which 'tends towards general or ideal things, such as works of art, 

 humanity in its entirety, and above all nature'^; but it was chiefly 

 the latter that he rebuked his more politically minded friend for 

 lacking: 'There is a method much higher, much clearer, much 

 surer, that of Spinoza.' 10 In a letter which begins by mentioning 

 Charles Fourier, Taine distinguished the three stages ('moments') 

 in the history of philosophy as materialism, represented by 

 Lucretius; spiritualism or 'psychology', represented by Descartes; 

 and the unity of the two : 



'The final stage is that in which man knows the radical unity of 

 himself and all things, the fundamental identity of pleasure and 

 duty, of liberty and necessity. That is called the philosophy of 

 substance or of the absolute; Spinoza is one of its admirable 

 interpreters.' 11 



And, recommending to his absent friend books of consolation, he 

 mentioned, 'If you were a philosopher, the fifth part of the 

 Ethics ."^^ 



Criticisms of Spinoza and Descartes 



Judging by a large body of 'Notes on Philosophy', begun shortly 

 before Taine's entry into Normal School and completed the next 

 summer (August, i849),i3 he remained largely under Spinoza's 

 spell during his freshman year. These 'Notes' were divided into 

 two parts, 'On Being' and 'On Thought', i^ and were written as a 

 'metaphysical geometry', very much in the manner of Spinoza's 

 Ethics, complete with axioms, propositions, proofs, and scholia. 

 They were an attempt to develop a priori, absolute laws of 

 thought: 



'One sees that no part is played here by experience. We main- 

 tain ourselves solely in the region of pure reason. . . . We do not 



