62 
NATURE 
[May 25,1871 

utilised to the utmost. This is, indeed, the special field 
which we look to the smaller hospitals to occupy in the 
future. Clinical instruction is pursued to a far greater 
advantage with a smaller than with a larger number of 
pupils. 


M. TAINE ON INTELLIGENCE 
On Intelligence. By H. Taine. Translated from the 
French by T. D. Haye, and revised by the Author. 
Part I. (London: Reeve and Co., 1871). 
N a notice, some months ago* in these colunins, of M. 
Ribot’s clever exposition of English psychology, 
mention was made of M, Taine’s work, De U'Jxtelligence, 
then newly come forth, as a striking evidence of the 
revival of French interest in the scientific investigation of 
mind. The first part of the work is now put before 
English readers in a translation satisfactory on the whole, 
and the second part is announced as soon to follow, 
The first part, as readers of the original must be aware, 
easily admits of being published separately. This hap- 
pens because M. Taine’s exposition, while presenting in 
the detail all the best qualities of his admirable style, is 
in its main lines laid out with a strict regard to principles 
of logical method. It falls into two sharply marked divi- 
sions, an analytic and asynthetic. No explanation of the 
different heads of knowledge making up our intelligence 
is attempted, until, by an analysis expressly performed, 
the ultimate elements of human cognition are come at. 
Often our English works on psychology, while they pass 
for, or claim to be, analytic, and do contain many cases 
of special analysis, are, in strictness, synthetic; the fore- 
gone general analysis being kept out of sight, and its 
sufficiency being left to appear from the character of the 
explanation which its results, as brought forward, may be 
made to yield. Of this description are the works of Prof. 
Bain, and eyen James Mill’s professed “ Analysis.” M. 
Taine, on the other hand, prefers to do his analysis not in 
the secret laboratory of his own mind but under the eye 
of the reader ; and the operation takes up the whole of his 
first part here translated. 
Obviously, when the phenomena are so complex and 
manifold as in the case of mind or intelligence, the ana- 
lysis, if it is thus to be exhibited, and if it is to be brought 
to anything like a definite issue, must be of facts carefully 
selected for their illustrative or representative character; 
and this M. Taine well apprehends. Nor does he less 
clearly see that normal facts or events of consciousness 
no more suffice for psychological science than can every- 
day observation take the place of artificial experiment in 
physical science. At different stages, therefore, he looks 
about him for cases either of what may be called artificial 
mental action, as in the ingenious processes resorted to 
by mathematicians, or of abnormal mental action, such as 
the phenomena of madness, hallucination, &c., which are 
a sort of nature’s experiments on a field where, for moral 
reasons, the freedom of experimenting is greatly limited. 
So, at the stage of the senses where experiment becomes 
perfectly feasible, he effectively turns to account the most 
advanced results got out in late years by psychologists or 
physiologists ; and, again, at the last stage of the analytic 
sounding, when he strikes upon a bottom of bare physio- 
* See Nature, Vol. ii. p. 331. 



logy, he makes apt selection from the most recent expe- 
rimental work. 
He begins by resolving thoughts, or (in the strict philo- 
sophical sense of the term) ideas, into images, on prin- 
ciples of thorough-going nominalism. Ideas the least 
general are shown to be impossible as mental experiences, 
and to need representation by particular signs, and ideas 
the most general and abstruse are shown to come within 
the mental grasp still by signs or symbols. There is the 
difference that in the case of natural objects, like tree or 
dog, the substituted sign, generally a name, is the direct 
expression of a mental “tendency” arising under actual 
impressions, varied at the same time that they are similar ; 
while to conceptions like those of mathematical science 
there may correspond no distinct impressions, and the 
sign is struck out according to an elaborate system of 
indirect substitution—substitutions upon substitutions. 
But always some definite image is present to the mind. 
The question, then, is to investigate the nature of parti- 
cular images ; and, by a very instructive muster of normal 
and abnormal instances, the laws of their retention out of 
consciousness and revival in consciousness are brought 
out, with the result that the image is itself seen to bea 
substitute of sensation below it. Must the analysis then 
end in a mere description of the kinds of sensation, with 
account taken of physical conditions? M. Taine thinks 
it need not, and wisely selects for special inquiry the sen- 
sations of sound—wisely, not merely because Helmholtz’s 
classical investigations lie ready to the psychologist’s hand, 
but also because no other set of sensations is at once so 
varied in character and so free from admixture with extra- 
neous elements. The result thence obtained, confirmed 
more or less from the senses of sight, smell, and taste, and 
not contradicted by the sense of touch, is that all quali- 
tative differences of consciousness within each sense are 
explicable as different compounds of an elementary sen- 
sation not conscious ; such elementary sensations, different 
in the different senses, being further conceivable as them- 
selves developed by composition out of a single infini- 
tesimal “ event,” of course imperceptible to consciousness, 
the truly ultimate element of all that appears as mind. 
But in relation with this there will stand a molecular dis- 
placement in nerve; for, as the physiological analysis, 
taken up when the psychological reaches its term, finds in 
the sensory ganglia the seat of crude sensation, and in the 
cerebral lobes with their cortical layer a “repeating and 
multiplying organ” through which sensations are asso- 
ciated and revived as images, and thus become knowledge, 
so it may see in the reflex action of lower nerve-centres 
the physical correlate of the simple unconscious “events” 
or elements of sensation. And thus the complete analysis 
of intelligence discloses two worlds, the moral and the 
physical, in mutual correspondence down to the lowest 
depths of human nature, and, by analogy, to the very foot 
of the zoological scale. 
Save that M. Taine’s method of procedure is his own, 
and his expression is always striking, there is little thus far 
in which he has not been anticipated by one psychologist 
or another among ourselves, notably by Mr. Spencer in 
the resolution of sensation, Nor in breaking up, in the 
last chapter of this part of his work, the metaphysical 
entities self and matter, regarded either as substances or 
as systems of faculties and forces, does he do more than 
