2i8 APPENDICES 



Of course, methods must be specified for isolating, or abstracting, 

 the causes, and we do not pretend 'that we know the material 

 substance and its activity in itself. ^4 But, by tracing causal rela- 

 tions among phenomena, we gradually discover the order of the 

 universe. 



'There results from this that the procedure of induction is the 

 use of a series of syllogisms of which the minors are perceptible 

 facts of experience, that is to say, in the last analysis, the affirma- 

 tion of certain modifications of ourselves, caused by external 

 objects, and which consequently correspond to them.'^s 



The major premise is our initial axiom of causality, in accordance 

 with which we reason. If our abstractions are properly made, we 

 can achieve our goal, which is not 'to arrive at the general from 

 the particular, but to discover the essence and the universal 

 under the particular.' 66 With Alfred Lord Tennyson, who wrote 

 in England a generation later of the 'flower in the crannied wall', 

 Taine believed that 



'. . . if I could understand 



What you are, root and all, and all in all, 



I should know what God and man is' 



Like most readers of Tennyson's poem, who fail to notice that the 

 word 'if is italicized, Taine's tendency was to translate this hypo- 

 thetical statement into a categorical one. 67 



Historical and Natural Science 



The analogy between historical and natural study which was so 

 central to Taine's method was made in a notebook on the 'History 

 of Philosophy', dated July, 1850,68 on which he worked during 

 the vacation period that summer in an attempt to summarize the 

 previous year's remarkable studies: 



'The History of Philosophy is entirely like natural History. 

 Organic types like philosophic ideas have their development, 

 their relations, their progress, their conditions of existence, their 

 causes for perishing.' 69 



Here, too, we find a clear statement of the theory of milieu as a 

 kind of 'moral temperature', which was later to be developed in 



The Philosophy of Art: 



'The philosophic idea, left to itself, just like the organic idea, 

 would go by a straight and uninterrupted movement towards its 

 fixed goal. But the first is subject to a moral temperature, just as 



