OF SOCIETY. 



505 



larger and wider spirit of research which, since the age 

 of Comte, had been introduced by the great naturalists 

 of France, Germany, and England. To this Comte had 

 given a name : he called it the esprit d 'ensemble. The 

 essence of this method consists in the frequently un- 

 conscious habit of looking at things natural not in their 

 isolation but in their " together " both in space and 

 in time. This habit had been introduced by such 

 naturalists as Comte himself reckoned among his fore- 

 runners, by Lamarck and Blainville. It also lived in 

 Humboldt and still more in von Baer. 1 In England 

 Lyell practised it with conspicuous success ; it has 

 resulted in and been popularised by the introduction 

 into the scientific and literary vocabulary of such terms 

 as the environment, the habitat, the milieu. This habit 

 of thought which frequently replaced or compensated the 

 one-sided spirit of analysis the dissecting and atomising 

 process of thought was not fully appreciated in its 

 fundamental importance before Darwin had made such 

 brilliant use of it, but it was, in the sequel, nowhere 

 appreciated more than in Comte's own country, where 

 we meet with one of its greatest representatives in the 

 region of historical writing. I refer to Hippolyte Taine. 

 No one did more than Taine to establish in his country 

 the rule of Positivism. But this Positivism was only 



53. 



Generalised 



Taine. 



1 In the first section of this work 

 this larger view, which led to such 

 great advance in the natural as 

 distinguished from the mechanical 

 sciences, was treated in three 

 chapters dealing respectively with 

 the morphological (panoramic), the 

 genetic (genealogical), and the vit- 

 alistic views of nature. All these 



views depend primarily on a com- 

 prehensive or synoptic, in contrast 

 to an atomising and dissecting, 

 habit of the mind, and this was 

 much stimulated by extensive 

 travels, as also by an artistic trait 

 in the intellectual constitution of 

 many of the great naturalists. 



