506 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



indirectly connected with that of Comte. In fact, what 

 is now generally considered by French writers as 

 characteristic of Positivism is a modification, at once an 

 enlargement and a curtailment, of the original Positivism 

 of Comte. It is a curtailment in so far as the later 

 phase of Comte's speculation is discarded and forgotten. 

 On the other side Comte's Positivism is enriched by the 

 addition of a genuine psychological interest, and it is 

 also enriched by a more definite conception of the " to- 

 gether " of things in time. Comte himself employs the 

 word evolution. This term had already been used by 

 Herder, but with both thinkers it remained vague 

 and indefinite. It acquired greater precision through 

 Herbert Spencer's earlier Essays, but still more through 

 Darwin's ' Principle of Natural Selection ' and subsequent 

 popular phraseology, as the " struggle for existence " and 

 the " survival of the fittest." 



Taine's philosophical creed was formed under the 

 influence of English thinkers like Mill, Bain, and 

 Spencer, and through a study of English literature and 

 the characteristics of English life, political and social. 

 In one of his earlier works on the French philosophers 

 of the nineteenth century he attacks — and, as it seemed 

 to many — demolishes the conventional spiritualistic and 

 eclectic philosophy which then ruled in his country 

 under the leadership of Victor Cousin ; but his attack 

 was led from a position which he had gained through 

 English psychology and English evolutionism. Probably 

 it was only after he had imbibed the spirit of both that 

 he came to recognise how much had been done already 

 by Comte in marking out an opposite and more fruitful 



