258 BIBLIOGRAPHY 



of Italy and tlie Netherlands. I have now to complete this study by familiarizing 

 you with the greatest and most original of all, the ancient Greek school. This 

 time I shall not discourse on painting. . . . Greek sculpture . . . will be the 

 subject of this course.' {Lectures on Art, Second Series, pp. 359-360.) 



1869 (October). — Philosophie de Vart en Grece, Lemons professees a I'Ecole des 

 Beaux- Arts, par H. Taine, Paris: Germer Bailliere, 1869, 204 pages. 



Same history as Philosophie de Vart. As a single volume in English: Art in 

 Greece, translated by J. Durand, New York: Leypoldt & Holt, 1871, vi-i88 

 pages. 



I 867- I 869 



De V Intelligence [On Intelligence] 



In a sense, Taine had been working on this opus at least since 1 851-1852, 

 when his thesis on The Sensations had been rejected; in November, 1853, he 

 wrote of it as the work on which he had been working for three years, i.e., since 

 1850, his second year at Normal School {V. & C., II, 22). In his later letters 

 it was referred to as a Traite de la Connaissance, and, especially during the first 

 years after his return from Poitiers, its subject was constantly being pursued by 

 means of scientific studies at the Sorbonne, the Museum and Medical School 

 of the University of Paris, and the Salpetriere (asylum in Paris for aged and 

 mentally afflicted women, the scene of Charcot's famous and influential studies 

 in hysteria). 



Starting in 1867, after a decade of interruption which had been caused by 

 his illness in 1857, most of Taine's energies were again given to the study of 

 psychology, broken only by interludes necessary for preparation of his lectures 

 at the £cole des beaux-arts. He had hoped to complete the study On Intelligence 

 with a comparable study On the Will (see the 'Plan du Traite de la Connais- 

 sance', Appendix I, V. & C.,ll, 377-380), but doubted his ability to complete 

 the task, and, in any case, the Franco-Prussian War intervened and led to a 

 radical change in his interests. From the 'Preface', dated December, 1869: 



'Between psychology thus conceived and history as it is now written, the 

 relationship is very close. For history is applied psychology, psychology applied 

 to more complex cases. The historian notes and traces the total transformation 

 presented by a particular human molecule, or group of human molecules; 

 and, to explain these transformations, writes the psychology of the molecule or 

 group; Carlyle has written that of Cromwell; Sainte-Beuve that of Port Royal; 

 Stendhal has made twenty attempts on that of the Italians; M. Renan has 

 given us that of the Semitic race. Every perspicacious and philosophical 

 historian labours at that of a man, an epoch, a people, or a race; the researches 

 of linguists, mythologists, and ethnographers have no other aim; the task is 

 invariably the description of a human mind, or of the characteristics common 

 to a group of human minds; and, what historians do with respect to the past, 

 the great novelists and dramatists do with the present. For fifteen years I 

 have contributed to these special and concrete psychologies; I now attempt 

 general and abstract psychology. To comprise it exhaustively, there would be 

 required a theory of the Will in addition to the theory of the Intelligence; if I 



