TAINE'S STUDENT CORRESPONDENCE AND NOTEBOOKS 221 



Hegel was out of the question, but a psychological thesis too 

 was 'dangerous', because of Taine's Spinozist position, which is 

 clear in his letters to Prevost-Paradol: 



'I too converse with you in your absence. While I gave you 

 Spinoza, you gave me Burdach and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; I 

 became a naturalist and you a metaphysician; and today we are 

 a single, same spirit. Do not fear lest I am giving way. We should 

 be fighting together, even if we were alone. I am preparing all 

 sorts of weapons. I shall make my first attack in psychology. In 

 that there are admirable things to be said on the sensations, 

 movements, origins of the passions, against the vision of God, and 

 the soul separated from the body. An entire series of explications 

 is to be substituted for final causes. Nature, which, in producing 

 individuals, isolates one portion of matter from the others, re- 

 establishes unity through the constitution of the senses. The eye is 

 made with regard to light, exists only for it, just as the liver exists 

 only for the stomach and is organized only to dissolve food. This 

 relation constitutes its being.'^s 



Taine's political intransigence, as well as his opposition to final 

 causes "^^ and insistence on the unity of soul with body, presented 

 insuperable obstacles to a reactionary and clerical-minded admini- 

 stration, and the blows came thick and fast. First, a menacing 

 letter, over Fortoul's signature, indicated that, judging by the 

 mere outline of his lessons in philosophy,8o he had not yet returned 

 from his errant ways, and he was therefore being transferred to 

 the chair of rhetoric at Poitiers, 'a branch of education less 

 dangerous to your future'. ^i Then, despite desperate attempts to 

 legitimize his theses by linking them with the entelechia of 

 Aristotle,82 hg ^^s notified on 7 June, 1852, by the Dean at 

 Poitiers, that his theses had been rejected, an indication that, 

 again, he could not hope for the 'agregation' that year.83 



The Disillusion with Hegel 



Since he had been considering the possibility of using Hegel's 

 Logic as the subject of his doctoral thesis, Taine began by reading 

 that work soon after arriving in Nevers: 



T am reading Hegel's Logic. It is an analysis of the principal 

 modes of possible being, the definitions being ranged in order and 



