[8] By Charcot (1825-1893), Leçons sur les Maladies du Système nerveux faites à la Salpêtrière and Localisation dans les Maladies du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, 1880.
By Ribot (1839-1916), Hérédité, Etude psychologique, 1873, Eng. trans., 1875; Les Maladies de la Mémoire, Essai dans la Psychologie positive, 1881, Eng. trans., 1882; Maladies de la Volonté, 1883, Eng. trans., 1884; Maladies de la Personnalité, 1885, Eng. trans., 1895. Ribot expressed regret at the way in which abnormal psychology has been neglected in England. See his critique of Bain in his Psychologie anglaise contemporaine. In 1870 Ribot declared the independence of psychology as a study, separate from philosophy. Ribot had very wide interests beyond pure psychology, a fact which is stressed by his commencing in 1876 the periodical La Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger.
By Binet (1857-191!), Magnétisme animal, 1886; Les Altérations de la personnalité, 1892; L’Introduction à la Psychologie expérimentale, 1894. He founded the review L’Année psychologique in 1895.
By Janet (Pierre), born 1859 now Professeur at the Collège de France, L’Automatisme psychologique, 1889; Etat mental des Hystériques, 1894; and Neuroses et Idées-fixes, 1898. He founded the Journal de Psychologie.
By Paulhan, Phénomenes affectifs and L’Activité mentale.
To the fame of the Paris School of Psychology must now be added that of the Nancy School embracing the work of Coué.
The War and the subsequent course of events in France seemed to deepen the sadness and pessimism of Taine’s character. He described himself as naturellement triste, and finally his severe positivism developed into a rigorous stoicism akin to that of Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza. This attitude of mind coloured his unfinished historical work, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, upon which he was engaged for the last years of his life (1876-1894). It may be noticed for its bearing upon the study of sociological problems which it indirectly encouraged. Just as Taine had regarded a work of art as the product of social environment, so he looks upon historical events. This history bears all the marks of Taine’s rigid, positive philosophy, intensified by his later stoicism. The Revolution of 1789 is treated in a cold and stern manner devoid of enthusiasm of any sort. He could not make historical narrative live like Michelet, and from his own record the Revolution itself is almost unintelligible. For Taine, however, we must remember, human nature is absolutely the product of race, environment and history.[[9]]
[9] Michelet (1798-1874), mentioned here as an historian of a type entirely different from Taine, influenced philosophic thought by his volumes Le Peuple, 1846; L’Amour, 1858; Le Prêtre, La Femme et la Famille, 1859; and La Bible de l’Humanité, 1864. He and his friend Quinet (1803-1875), who was also a Professor at the College de France, and was the author of Génie des Religions, 1842, had considerable influence prior to 1848 of a political and religious character. They were in strong opposition to the Roman Catholic Church and had keen controversies with the Jesuits and Ultramontanists.
In the philosophy of Taine various influences are seen at work interacting. The spirit of the French thinkers of the previous century—sensualists and ideologists—reappears in him. While in a measure he fluctuates between naturalism and idealism, the predominating tone of his work is clearly positivist. He was a great student of Spinoza and of Hegel, and the influence of both these thinkers appears in his work. Like Spinoza, he believes in a universal determination; like Hegel, he asserts the real and the rational to be identical. In his general attitude to the problems of knowledge Taine criticises and passes beyond the standpoints of both Hume and Kant. He opposes the purely empiricist schools of both France and England. The purely empirical attitude which looks upon the world as fragmentary and phenomenal is deficient, according to Taine, and is, moreover, incompatible with the notion of necessity. This notion of necessity is characteristic of Taine’s whole work, and his strict adherence to it was mainly due to his absolute belief in science and its methods, which is a mark of all the positivist type of thought.
While he rejected Hume’s empiricism he also opposed the doctrines of Kant and the neo-critical school which found its inspiration in Kant and Hume. Taine asserted that it is possible to have a knowledge of things in their objective reality, and he appears to have based his epistemology upon the doctrine of analysis proposed by Condillac. Taine disagreed with the theory of the relativity of human knowledge and with the phenomenal basis of the neo-critical teaching, its rejection of “the thing in itself.” He believed we had knowledge not merely relative but absolute, and he claimed that we can pass from phenomena and their laws to comprehend the essence of things in themselves. He endeavours to avoid the difficulties of Hume by dogmatism. While clinging to a semi-Hegelian view of rationality he avoids Kant’s critical attitude to reason itself. We have in Taine not a critical rationalist but a dogmatic rationalist. While the rational aspect of his thought commands a certain respect and has had in many directions a very wholesome influence, notably, as we have remarked, upon psychology, yet it proves itself in the last analysis self-contradictory, for a true rationalism is critical in character rather than dogmatic.
In Taine’a great contemporary, Ernest Renan (1823-1892), a very different temper is seen. The two thinkers both possessed popularity as men of letters, and resembled one another in being devoted to literary and historical pursuits rather than to philosophy itself.
Renan was trained for the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. He has left us a record of his early life in Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse. We there have an autobiography of a sincere and sensitive soul, encouraged in his priestly career by his family and his teachers to such a degree that he had conceived of no other career for himself, until at the age of twenty, under the influence of modern scientific doctrines and the criticism of the Biblical records, he found himself an unbeliever, certainly not a Roman Catholic, and not, in the ordinary interpretation of that rather vague term, a Christian. The harsh, unrelenting dogmatism of the Roman Church drove Renan from Christianity. We find him remarking that had he lived in a Protestant. country he might not have been faced with the dilemma.[[10]] A via media might have presented itself in one of the very numerous forms into which Protestant Christianity, is divided. He might have exercised in such a sphere, his priestly functions as did Schleiermacher. Renan’s break with Rome emphasises the clear-cut division which exists in France between the Christian faith (represented, almost entirely by the Roman Church) and libre-pensée, a point which will claim our attention later, when we come to treat of the Philosophy of Religion.
[10] Cf. his Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, p. 292.
Having abandoned the seminary and the Church, Renan worked for his university degrees. The events of 1848-49 inspired his young heart with great enthusiasm, under the influence of which he wrote his Avenir de la Science. This book was not published, however, until 1890, when he had lost his early hopes and illusions. In 1849 he went away upon a mission to Italy. “The reaction of 1850-51 and the coup d’état instilled into me a pessimism of which I am not yet cured,” so he wrote in the preface to his Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques.[[11]] Some years after the coup d’état he published a volume of essays (Essais de Morale et de Critique), and he showed his acquaintance with Arabic philosophy by an excellent treatise on Averroes et l’Averroisme (1859). The following year he visited Syria and, in 1861, was appointed Professor of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He then began his monumental work on Les Origines du Christianisme, of which the first volume, La Vie de Jésus, appeared in 1863. Its importance for religious thought we shall consider in our last chapter; here it must suffice to observe its immediate consequences. These were terrific onslaughts from the clergy upon its author, which, although they brought the attention of his countrymen and of the world upon Renan, resulted in the Imperial Government suspending his tenure of the chair. After the fall of the Empire, however, he returned to it, and under the Third Republic became Director of the Collège de France.
[11] Published only in 1895. The preface referred to is dated 1871.