contemporary German literature without perceiving how potential still is the school which relies wholly upon the positive sciences, and puts aside entirely psychology and metaphysics. Its prevalence in England may be sufficiently indicated by merely mentioning the names of the three accomplished scientists at whose teaching we have already glanced, the late Professor Clifford, Professor Huxley, and Mr.Herbert Spencer, not to speak of Professor Tyndall. But if we would see this way of thinking have free course, if we would fully realize the inglorious liberty of the sous of matter, it is upon France that we must gaze. In that country, at the present moment, the most widely influential school is unquestionably the medico-atheistic: the school which inculcates sensism of the grossest kind, which reeks of the brothel, the latrine, and the torture-trough. "A most superficial and most degraded positivism," M.Beaussire tells us in his recent able work,[1] "seems to have taken possession of well-nigh all souls." A remnant, indeed, is left in the higher regions of French thought which has not bowed the knee to the Baal of dead mechanism, nor joined itself to the dung-god. In M.Caro and M.Janet, to mention no others, may be found worthy successors of Cousin and Maine de Biran, But unquestionably the two greatest intellectual forces in France at the present time are M.Renan and M.Taine, neither of whom can be claimed by spiritualism. I do not lose sight of the many magnificent passages in which M.Renan pays homage to the super-sensuous, the ideal, the divine. Yet there is ever before him the haunting suspicion that, after all, Gavroche maybe right—that "jouir et mépriser "may be the last word of the true philosopher. There are those who find the secret of his transitions of thought in the famous mot of M. Sardou's comedy, "J'ai assez pratiqué le monde pour savoir qu'on n'a jamais que la conviction de ses intérĜêts." There are those again who tell us that in his profound and serene intellect every passing phase of contemporary thought is reflected like the clouds in the bosom of the calm ocean. I am not ambitious to decide which explanation is the true one. It is enough for me to point to his own account of himself, which is that he does not know whether or no he is a materialist: "Je ne sais bien si je suis spiritualiste ou matérialiste. Le but du monde, c'est l'idée: mais je ne connais pas un cas où l'idée se soit produite sans matière: je ne connais pas d'esprit pur, ni d'œuvre d'esprit pur," M.Taine has of late years been most prominently before the world as the first living historian of his country, perhaps of any country. But we must not forget that his high place among contemporary thinkers was first won as a philosopher. A closely knit system his is, indeed. But what a system! A system of mechanism and fatality, dealing with the universe as an immense and
- ↑ "Les Principes de la Morale," Paris, 1885. The extremely striking introduction—whence my citation is taken—attracted much notice when it appeared originally in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" of August 1, 1884.
