expounded with consummate literary skill in the most celebrated of his philosophical writings, 'Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien,' the main conclusions at which he had arrived in psychology, in metaphysics and theodicy, in ethics, and in æsthetics. As regards psychology, his proof of the irreducibility of sensation, will, and reason to a single principle was of vital importance; his account of intelligence as spontaneous and reflective had much influence; and his theory of the impersonality of reason was worthy of all the attention which it has received. As to metaphysics and theodicy, he based them on the most solid foundations, gave prominence to the truths which deserved it, and committed himself to the defence of few untenable positions. Alike as regards spirit and substance his ethical teaching was admirable. And although his solutions of the chief problems of æsthetics were vague and inadequate, his criticisms of antecedent and contemporary theories were relevant and decisive, and prepared the way for such investigations as those to which we owe the Cours d'Esthétique' of Jouffroy and 'La Science du Beau' of Lêvêque.

Notwithstanding what I have just said, I admit that Cousin was much better qualified to draw up philosophical programmes than to realise them; that he showed little taste for psychological research; that he was not a metaphysician of the first order; that he overlooked the connections of physical science with philosophy; and that he sometimes made fine words pass for great thoughts, and displayed his rhetorical gifts to excess. Hence in the representation of him given by Taine and Lewes there is the modicum of truth which is indispensable to give verisimilitude to caricature. A gross caricature, however, it is, and not a portrait of the man, who is justly entitled to be regarded as the most notable and influential personage in far the most comprehensive and fruitful philosophical movement which France has felt in the nineteenth century.1

1 See on Cousin the 'Éloges' of Mignet and Jules Favre; Taine, 'Philosophes français'; Renan, 'Essais de morale et de critique'; Franck, 'Moralistes et philosophes,' and 'Nouveaux essais de critique philosophique'; Caro, 'Philosophie et philosophes'; and especially Paul Janet, 'Victor Cousin et son œuvre,' 1885, and Jules Simon, 'Victor Cousin,' 1887. His general philosophy has been treated of by Damiron, Bersot, Alaux, Secretan, Ravaisson, Ferraz, &c. He has himself described in the famous prefaces to the first two editions of his 'Frag

The greatest service rendered by Cousin to philosophy was one which was also a direct service to the philosophy of history. It was the impulse which he gave to a truly philosophical and at the same time truly historical study of the history of philosophy. With marvellous success he induced men to interest themselves in the history of philosophy as being philosophy itself in the process of evolution; and to study it as such in a free, critical, and impartial spirit. It will be said, and with perfect justice, that Hegel had preceded him in so conceiving of the relation of philosophy to its history; and that he had even applied his conception by treating of the history of philosophy with a profundity and subtlety of which Cousin was incapable. But in this reference a very important difference between them must be noted. Hegel went to the history of philosophy in order to show that its whole evolution was an exemplification of the philosophy which he had elaborated; Cousin went to it in order to be guided to a philosophy which he wished to discover. Hegel construed the history to make it conform to his speculative conclusions; Cousin was content to study it without any other assumption than that if examined. impartially and comprehensively it would lead to the discovery of a catholic eclecticism which would separate the true from the false in all anterior systems, and harmonise all truths in them which had hitherto appeared inconsistent and antagonistic. This, however, is equivalent to saying that Hegel's method of treating the history of philosophy was directly antiscientific and unreasonable, while Cousin's was legitimate and appropriate.

It was in the lectures delivered at Paris in 1828 to an admiring audience of two thousand persons that he propounded his historical theories; and it is only with that part of his system which relates to history that I mean to deal. It was the last part added, and it is that on which the influence of Hegel is most apparent. As regards this influence, it must be remembered that although Hegel's Philosophy of History' was only published in 1837, Cousin was not only acquainted

ments' the successive steps of his philosophical career with great candour, and with a truth which can be easily substantiated by an examination of his works in their chronological order.

with the outlines of world-history contained in the Encyclopædia' (1817) and the Philosophy of Right' (1820); but during a stay of some months at Berlin in 1824-25 had met Hegel, and become intimate with some of his most zealous disciples, Gans, Hotho, Henning, and Michelet; and again in 1827 had enjoyed a month of Hegel's society in Paris. It is very probable, therefore, that Cousin derived his views on historical optimism, war, great men, and some of the other subjects treated by him in the 'Cours de 1828' directly or indirectly from Hegel. Certainly his intercourse with Hegel must have confirmed him in them. As he has generally stated them with more clearness and more appearance of proof than Hegel, I shall discuss them as he has presented them, and shall not consider it necessary to dwell on them when Hegel comes under review.

The general aim of the first three lectures is to determine the place of philosophy and of its history within universal history. Psychological analysis is maintained to be indispensable to the accomplishment of the task. The various manifestations and phases of social life are all traced back to the tendencies of human nature from which they spring; to five fundamental wants, each of which has corresponding to it a general idea. The idea of the useful gives rise to mathematical and physical science, industry and political economy; the idea of the just to civil society, the State, and jurisprudence; the idea of the beautiful to art; the idea of God to religion and worship; and the idea of truth in itself, in its highest degree and under its purest form, to philosophy. These ideas are argued to be simple and indecomposable; to coexist in every mind; to constitute the whole foundation of humanity; and to follow in the order mentioned. But if human nature manifests itself in the individual, it manifests itself also in the race, the history of which is, in fact, but the representation of human nature on a great scale. There is in the race only the elements which are in the individual. The unity of civilisation is in the unity of human nature; its varieties are in the variety of the elements of that nature. All that is in human nature passes into the movement of civilisation, to subsist, organise itself, and prospers, if essential and necessary, but soon to be

extinguished if accidental and individual. Therefore, as human nature is the matter and the base of history, history is, so to speak, the judge of human nature, and historical analysis is the counterproof of psychological analysis. History, called in to the help of analysis, shows us that civilisation - the magnified image of human nature—includes at all epochs a philosophic element, which has a distinct, always subsisting, and continually increasing part or history on the stage of the world; and that what philosophy is to the other elements of human nature and civilisation, the history of philosophy is to the other branches of universal history. It shows us that the history of philosophy is the last of all the developments of history, but superior to them all,-the only one in which humanity knows itself fully, with all its elements borne, as it were, to their highest power, and set in their truest and clearest light.

In the fourth lecture M. Cousin treats of the psychological method in history. He argues that the historical method can be neither exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, by which he means deductive, but both in union; and that, combining speculation with empiricism in a legitimate manner, it must start from the human reason, enumerate completely its elements, reduce them by a severely scientific analysis to the lowest number possible, determine their relationship, and follow their development in history, with the hope of discovering that the historical development is an expression of the internal development of reason. Accordingly, he sets about laying the foundation of this method by a study of the categories of thought. He reaches the result that in the last analysis the constitutive and regulative principles of reason are three: the idea of the infinite, otherwise called unity, substance, the absolute, &c.; the idea of the finite, likewise designated plurality, difference, phenomenon, relative existence, the conditioned, &c.; and the idea of the relation between the infinite and the finite, a relation which so unites the two terms that they are inseparable, and, along with itself, constitute, at the same time, a triplicity and an indivisible unity.1

1 It has been considered expedient to distinguish the expository and critical portions of this chapter by printing the former in larger, and the latter in smaller, print.

Cousin had the great merit of seeing that psychology and the philosophy of history are intimately related. He perceived that the latter has its root in the former; that the science of history is properly a psychological science; that it presupposes a knowledge of the fundamental powers, affections, and laws of the human mind and character; and that historical analysis may supplement and correct, but can neither be severed from nor substituted for psychological analysis. Probably no one before him had seen so clearly that "necessity of connecting all our generalisations from history with the laws of human nature," the honour of recognising which J. S. Mill most erroneously ascribed to "M. Comte alone, among the new historical school."

He

It must be admitted, however, that Cousin was far from entirely faithful to his own doctrine. Indeed, he had no sooner enunciated it than he to a large extent implicitly withdrew it by surreptitiously substituting human reason for human nature. What warrant is there for this? Why limit the field from which deductions applicable to history may be drawn to reason, a single part or faculty of human nature? Why exclude anything truly belonging to that nature? Cousin does not give any explicit reasoned answer. makes an attempt to show that in every act of consciousness the three terms or ideas which have been specified are involved as conditions, and forthwith proceeds to argue as if he had thereby reduced all the phenomena of consciousness to these terms, in strange obliviousness of there being a great difference between the detection of the formal or metaphysical conditions of consciousness and the analysis of consciousness into its real or psychological elements. It does not appear to have occurred to him that he might have succeeded in discovering the ultimate categories of reason, and yet have the inquiry into human nature as the basis of history to begin; that the conditions implied in the possibility of reason are not the laws of the development of reason, and still less of those principles which are distinct from reason. He abandons, in fact, without seeming to know that he is doing so, the great truths with which he starts: that the matter of history is human nature in its entirety, in all its wants, faculties, and principles; and that a science of history can be founded on no narrower basis than the whole of psychological science supplies. He seeks to build not on the whole mind, but on reason alone, or rather not even on reason, as a positive principle of the mental constitution and life-which is the only sense in which it is a true factor of history-but on abstract ideas of reason with which metaphysics is conversant, but with which the science of history has no more to do than the science of chemistry. He thus sacrifices in practice the important truths which he holds in theory.

The next three lectures treat of the fundamental ideas of