2i6 APPENDICES 



not see the question; he proves that substance does not imply any 

 contradiction, but not that it exists in a determinate fashion. He 



proves possibilities, not existences.'^ ^^ 



But Taine has not left Spinoza behind through this criticism; 

 rather, he was trying to give that philosopher's abstract system 

 concreteness: 



'Spinoza could prove that Substance exists, but not that it 

 exists in a determinate fashion. . . . How indeed to draw the 

 removed part from the part from which one has removed it and 

 which no longer has it? The truth is that the two are nothing but 

 one, that the one does not go without the other. . . . The solution 

 is in the identity of Substance and the attributes.' ^ 5 



Metaphysical Systems 



During Taine's last year at Bourbon College, he still wrote in 

 the accents of Platonic Idealism, as Chevrillon has noted, ^6 but 

 even then, under the influence of Spinoza, he was trying to hnk 

 'essence' with 'cause'. ^^ The metaphysical issue emerges most 

 clearly in an 1850 manuscript, his 'First Views on Hegel', which 

 criticized the German thinker because, for him, 'All reality is in 

 thought.' 58 



But reality is more than an unfolding Idea: 



'An idea which does not get known has only its possibility of 

 knowledge. In itself, it is a non-entity. Being, on the contrary, in 

 our sense, far from being a possibility, is the absolute reality. The 

 world does not emerge from it as from a seed, and does not realize 

 it as action, virtuality. It is the world itself under the form of 

 unity.'59 



Taine accepted Hegel's dynamism, but found his dialectic lacking 

 because it remained Platonic: 



'We, on the contrary, consider Being, not as a mode of eternal 

 and indeterminate existence (Plato), nor as a mode of existence 

 originally distinct, and passing forever towards a greater deter- 

 mination, but as a general form of existence, which contains 

 universal existence in action and under the aspect of absolute 

 unity. Being is; that signifies for us: the whole is, every thing 

 being a particularization, an aspect of Being.'^o 



