Publication of De l’intelligence

In 1870 he published the two volumes of De l’intelligence (On Intelligence), a major work in the discipline of psychology, which had interested him since his youth. His devotion to science is most fully illustrated here; he opposes the speculative and introspective approach of the eclectics and outlines a scientific methodology for the study of human personality that established him, alongside thinkers such as Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet, as a founder of empirical psychology. Though much of the work is now outdated, in its day it helped to modify methods of research by its emphasis on experiment, the search for causes, the study of pathological cases, and the physiological basis of personality. It also intensified opposition to his ideas, and he was angrily accused of holding a strictly determinist and materialist view of man—not altogether unfairly, even though he claimed to reject materialism and argued that moral responsibility was compatible with determinism as he conceived it.

The work also develops his long-standing attempt to fuse positivism and Hegelian idealism and to provide a method for a scientific metaphysics. Through such a metaphysics, he maintained, the final causes of life itself might be discovered; its insights inspired him to an exalted pantheistic trust in nature that is movingly expressed in essays on Marcus Aurelius (in Nouveaux essais) and Iphigeneia (in Derniers essais).

Germany’s invasion and defeat of France in 1870–71 had a profound impact upon Taine (already prepared in his mind by a visit in 1869 that had disabused him of his earlier enthusiasm for German civilization). The French defeat, in his view, sprang from a deep national sickness, and he determined to devote his final years to examining its causes. A shift of interest toward politics is illustrated by a brochure of 1872 on the problems and effects of universal suffrage, but, above all, his approach was historical: to seek the sources of the political instability that he held responsible for his country’s plight.

Historical theories

This major reorientation of concern led to his great historical work, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (“The Origins of Contemporary France”), a monumental analysis, claiming scientific objectivity (although its factual and interpretative reliability have been challenged). It seeks to show that France’s primary fault lay in excessive centralization, originating during the ancien régime, and intensified by the French Revolution, about which he shares and develops Edmund Burke’s hostile view. Taine asserted that far from promoting liberty, as most of the French believe, the Revolution merely transferred absolute power to even more illiberal hands. The first volume, L’Ancien Régime (“The Old Regime”), appeared in 1876, followed by three volumes on the Revolution (1878–85). In 1878 he was also elected to the Académie Française.

To have more time for his self-appointed task, he withdrew increasingly from Paris and after 1883 even resigned his professorship. He died in Paris in March 1893 and was buried at Menthon-Saint-Bernard. Only one volume of Le Régime moderne (“The Modern Regime”), however, had been published in his lifetime (1891); the second volume came out in November 1893. The entire work was reissued in 1899. There also appeared after his death his Derniers essais de critique et d’histoire (1894; “Last Essays of Criticism and History”) and an unfinished autobiographical and psychological novel, written about 1861, Étienne Mayran (1910).

Taine had achieved fame over a wide range of disciplines—as a leading French thinker, as a literary and art critic, and as a historian. His greatest influence upon his contemporaries, however, was as an intellectual leader, one of the most esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism, the cult of science in its most devoted, high-minded, and rational form. His work represents a reaction against excessive emotionalism and spiritualist philosophy and was unified by his attempt to apply the scientific method to the study of literature and art, psychology, and cultural history and to ethics and metaphysics. Taine’s ideas helped provide a theoretical basis for the literary movement of naturalism; the novel, he argued, should contribute to the scientific understanding of human nature, revealing, like the new scientific psychology he advocated, the physiological and psychological determinants of human behaviour.