TAINE'S STUDENT CORRESPONDENCE AND NOTEBOOKS 219 



the second is to a physical temperature. The moral, religious, 



artistic, and emotional state of the country determines the special 



production of such a philosophic idea. It is necessary to take it 



greatly into account in order to explain the reason, at such a 



given moment, for such a break, for such a failure, for such a 

 development.' '70 



Thus, Taine assumed the existence of order or system in history, 

 as in nature, but the particular powers under consideration were 

 taken to exist 'hypothetically in the nation in question'. ^1 



This was followed by tentative outlines of the history of modern 

 philosophy, and some notes on the 'subjective character of 

 Christianity' and on 'general historic movements'. The centrality 

 of psychology as Taine's 'principle for the classification of systems' 

 was expressed as follows: 



'(i) Metaphysicians : To have the definition of Being (of the 

 Whole) and the order of what it contains. 



'(2) Psychologists : To have the definition of the soul and the 

 order of all that it contains. 



'(The intermediate solution would be: (i) To give a meta- 

 physics where a psychology may be; (2) to arrive at metaphysics 

 through psychology.) '72 



Again, he felt that this new conception of method 'leads me to 

 correct what I wrote last year', referring to the 'Notes' of August, 

 1849: 'The essence of philosophy is to be science, the total science, 

 the summary of the others, the system of knowledge. This system 

 embraces the objective and the subjective. '"^3 



The influence of Hegel's dialectic was evident, but with a 

 difference: 'Given a conception or hypothesis, one applies it to 

 various cases, and one creates a system; there is its development. 

 Then it reveals contradictions which throw up another hypothesis, 

 and so forth.' "74 Here 'conceptions' were treated as hypotheses, and 

 the goal had become to use scientific method in 'general philo- 

 sophy or metaphysics'. However, philosophy could not be content 

 'to generalize the results of other sciences'; it was the science of 

 the 'possible' and the 'necessary', rather than of the real and the 

 accidental. As we have already seen, from his criticisms of 

 Spinoza,'75 the distinguishing characteristic of philosophy for 

 Taine lay in its attempt to pass from observation of reality to the 

 absolute: 



