OF THE SOUL. 235 



Maine de Biran influenced mathematicians like 

 Ampere and Sophie Germain, as well as leaders of the 

 higher instruction such as Eoyer Collard and Victor 

 Cousin. 



With the intention of escaping from the materialism 

 of the opposite school, and with a desire of impressing 

 younger minds with the realities of the inner world, 

 Eoyer Collard, who like so many others had gone 

 through the disillusionment of the Revolution, adopted 

 the method of introspection, which in the course of his 

 studies he found to be most genuinely represented by 

 Thomas Eeid. He was animated by the " idea of trans- 

 ferring into the domain of philosophy the method of 

 observation to which we owe the discovery of so many * 

 truths in the natural sciences, and of abandoning the 



tendency to systematise, that inexhaustible source of 





 error. 



Eoyer Collard was appointed to the chair of History 29. 

 of Philosophy at the University by the Emperor Napoleon coiiard and 

 in 1811. This new departure in philosophical teaching, 

 which Eoyer Collard continued for only four years, was 

 taken up and brilliantly carried on for a long period by 

 Victor Cousin (1792-1867). The centre of gravity of 

 his teaching lay in the history of philosophy, the 

 exhaustive exposition of which by means of a fascinating 

 but frequently fanciful rhetoric had the result of in- 

 teresting a large number of younger talents in the study 

 of the various philosophies of the ancient and modern 

 world from an ideal point of view. Biran recognised 

 that this teaching led away from the true psychology 

 which he had in view, but he himself did not escape the 



