Hippolyte Taine’s On Intelligence is a work of nineteenth-century French philosophy of mind, translated into English by T. D. Haye and revised with additions by the author. Taine dedicates it to the memory of Franz Woepke, the Orientalist and mathematician who died in Paris in 1864, and frames it as the book he had most fully meditated. Its subject is what he calls intelligence—the faculty of knowing—and it proceeds not by speculating about hidden faculties but by treating cognitions themselves as facts to be observed, described, and reduced to their simplest elements.
“If I am not mistaken, we mean nowadays by Intelligence, what was formerly called Understanding or Intellect — that is to say, the faculty of knowing ; this, at least, is the sense in which I have taken the word.”
The Core Argument
Taine’s central claim is that psychology becomes a science only when it stops positing mysterious entities and starts examining actual events. The words “faculty,” “capacity,” and “power,” which had played so large a part in psychology, are for him nothing but convenient labels for grouping facts of a distinct kind; they name a common character shared by a class of facts, not a hidden essence persisting beneath the flow of transient experience. He therefore treats cognitions—sensations, ideas, recollections, previsions—as facts with precedents, accompaniments, and consequents, reproducible and describable like a vibration or any other physical movement. The method is one of consecutive reductions: from complex knowledge down to the simplest elements, and from those elements down to the physiological changes that condition their origin. Consciousness, his principal instrument, is not sufficient in its ordinary state; it must be assisted, corrected, magnified, treated almost like a lens for the mind’s eye.
The book’s second great claim concerns general ideas. We do not, strictly speaking, have them. What we call a general idea is a name—not the mere sound, but the sound endued with a double property: it arouses images of individuals of a certain class and only those, and it revives only when such an individual is present. Having seen many trees, a tendency corresponding to the two distinctive characters of a tree becomes predominant, surviving while other tendencies are effaced by mutual contradiction. That tendency issues in an expression: a vague image, a gesture, a word. The word tree differs from a meaningless syllable because it involuntarily pictures an oak or poplar and is involuntarily pronounced on seeing any tree. Taine calls this an admirable and spontaneous artifice of nature. We cannot perceive general qualities or hold them separate, yet they are the veins that constitute the classification of things; so we attach each abstract quality to a small, manageable fact—a sound, a figure—and let the name stand in for the impossible representation. The couple so formed resembles a physical instrument: the reddening of stained paper or the twist of a suspended needle brings within range of our senses changes to which our senses could not otherwise attain.
Inside the Book
The Argument That General Ideas Are Only Tendencies to Name
After seeing many trees, a tendency forms that corresponds only to the two distinctive characters of a tree—springing trunk and spreading branches—and this tendency becomes predominant, surviving while other tendencies are effaced by mutual contradiction. It issues in an expression: mentally a vague image, outwardly an imitative gesture, in primitive language a figurative imitation, and now a simple word learned by notation—the dry remains of the original symbolical drama and living mimicry by which the first inventors, true artists, translated their impressions. We conceive a general quality when, having seen a series of objects with a common quality, we experience a tendency corresponding to that quality alone, which calls up the name. We do not perceive qualities or general characters; we experience a distinct tendency resulting in mimicry or a name. Strictly speaking, we have no general ideas, only tendencies to name and names. A tendency is the rudiment, the sketch, the approximation to some determinate act. What we call a general idea is only a name—not the mere sound or letters, but the sound or letters endued with a double property: arousing images of individuals of a certain class and only those, and reviving only when such an individual is present. The difference between the word tree, which has meaning, and the word eter, which has none, is that the first involuntarily pictures an oak, poplar, or pear tree, and is involuntarily pronounced on seeing any tree. The word arbre has the same properties for a Frenchman. A name we understand is connected with all individuals of a certain class and only those, corresponding to the common and distinctive quality constituting the class. It becomes the mental representative and substitute of an experience we cannot attain, fulfilling its office and being equivalent to it.
This is an admirable and spontaneous artifice of nature: we can neither perceive general qualities nor maintain them separate, yet they are the precious veins constituting the essence and foundation of the classification of things. To emerge from gross animal experience and seize the order and internal structure of the world, we must draw them from their ore and conceive them apart. We make a circuit, associating with each abstract quality a little special complex fact—a sound, a figure easy to imagine and reproduce—making the association so close that the quality cannot appear or be missing without the appearance or absence of the name, and reciprocally. The couple so formed resembles physical and chemical instruments which, by a trifling sensible change—the displacement of a needle, the alteration of a color—bring within range of our senses decompositions of substances or variations of currents to which our senses cannot otherwise attain. The sudden reddening of stained paper or the twist of a suspended needle are connected with an inner change or hidden action, and we observe the second things, to which we cannot directly attain, in the first to which we do attain. Similarly, when dealing with a general quality of which we can have neither experience nor sensible representation, we substitute, and substitute legitimately, a name for the impossible representation. It has the same affinities and repugnances, the same hindrances to and conditions of existence, the same extent and limits of presence. Owing to this correspondence, the general characters of things are brought within range of our experience, for the names expressing them are themselves small experiences of sight, ear, vocal muscles, or internal images—revivals of these experiences. An extraordinary difficulty has been surmounted: with beings whose life is but one varied and continuous experience, special and complex impressions alone can be found; out of these nature has manufactured the equivalents of others which are neither special nor complex, and which would seem as if they must escape forever by necessity and nature from beings constituted as we are.
The formation of general names may be narrowly watched in little children. We name to them a particular determined object, and, with an instinct of imitation common to monkeys and parrots, they repeat the name. Up to this point they are but as monkeys and parrots; but here there appears a delicacy of impression special to man. We pronounce the word papa before a child, pointing out his father. After a little, he lisps the word, and we imagine he understands it as we do, or that his father’s presence only will recall the word. Not at all. When another person—similar in appearance, with a long coat, a beard, and loud voice—enters, he calls him also papa. The name was an individual one; he has made it general. In our case it is applicable to one person only; in his, to a class. A certain tendency, corresponding to what is common to all persons in long coats, with beards and loud voices, is aroused in him. This tendency is not what you were attempting to excite; it springs up spontaneously. In it we have the faculty of language. It is wholly founded on the consecutive tendencies which survive the experience of similar individuals, and corresponds precisely to what they have in common. We see these tendencies continually at work in children, leading to results differing from ordinary language, so that we are obliged to correct their spontaneous and too hasty attempts. A little girl, two years and a half old, had a blessed medal hung at her neck. She had been told, “C’est le bon Dieu,” and she repeated, “C’est le bo Du.” One day, on her uncle’s knee, she took his eyeglass, and said, “C’est le bo Du de mon oncle.” It is plain that she had involuntarily and naturally constructed a class of objects for which we have no name: that of small round objects, with a handle, through which a hole is pierced.
Images, Hallucinations, and Memory
Taine describes his habit of recording vivid representations and tracing them back through association of ideas, noting he never saw a presentiment verified. On one occasion, he explains thinking of an absent friend through the thread of interrupted thoughts, and the friend appearing as a corpse through a subjective complementary-color sensation caused by prolonged contemplation of a mountain’s color, combined with reminiscence. This case shows sensation’s abnormal effect: it turns vague representation into sensible phantom, and when it ceases, the phantom returns to vague representation. He uses a balance metaphor: in normal wakefulness, sensations outweigh images; in illness, weight passes to images producing hallucination; when a thread links weights across scales, illusion results. Recollections and general judgments form a cohesive reductive group. He cites his own dream of drawing off boots in company, reduced upon waking by returning recollections and the judgment “It is a dream.” M. Baillarger dreamed a person was appointed editor of a newspaper and believed it until three o’clock. Balzac imagined giving Sandeau a white horse. M. Maury’s old man confused travels and readings, claiming he had been in India with Tavernier, in the Sandwich Isles with Cook, and served under Lafayette. Dr. Gregory, taking laudanum, saw a consumptive lady’s figure despite knowing it a phantasm. The gendarme S., at a March 1862 execution, was haunted by the bleeding head, dreamed of condemnation by the Minister of War, heard a clock voice saying he must die, fled, hid, fired on comrades, and recovered by the 7th. Taine concludes mind is a polypus of interdependent sensations and images, with equilibrium constituting reasonable wakefulness.
The Senses Reduced to Quantity: Hearing, Sight, Smell, and Taste
Sensations of sound arrange themselves in a pyramid: deep sounds at the base, acute sounds at the summit.
The Brain as the Sole Seat of Sensation
Sensation’s immediate condition, Taine argues, is a molecular movement in the nervous centres—and that movement alone suffices to produce sensation without any intervention from the nerves. Hallucinations prove it. Visions that come before sleep arise when the eyes are closed and the nerves pacified, yet vague images swell into intensity and clarity: the brain is acting by itself. Direct excitation of the brain—inflammation, haschich—produces hallucinations too. Esquirol’s cases are telling: a blind, insane Jewess of thirty-eight saw extraordinary objects although her optic nerves had atrophied from the intersection to the eyeballs; two patients who each lost an eye to phthisis of the eyeball hallucinated on the lost side as readily as on the sound one; and two absolutely deaf women at the Salpêtrière heard disputing voices. Griesinger objects that direct irritation yields only luminous patches, globes of flame, coloured figures, buzzings, noises—not complex forms like houses, men, or trees, nor actual words or tunes. M. Robin’s microscope letter describes persistent images after long microscope use, oscillating, diminishing, reappearing paler, vanishing more readily on white paper than dark mahogany, which he attributes to the cerebral centre of visual perception rather than the retina. Hence a distinction: pseudæsthesia of the peripheral extremities (sparks, flashes, noises, ticklings) versus pseudæsthesia of the perceptive centres (complete organized images). Vivisections settle the geography. Remove the encephalon but keep the medulla oblongata, and reflex movements remain without true sensation; preserve the pons Varolii and you get pain cries, hearing (rats startled by a purring noise), and taste (colocynth in kittens). The corpora quadrigemina govern sight, as a pigeon avoiding a hand shows. The cerebral lobes govern images; their removal abolishes instincts, memory, judgment—hen, frogs, mole, cat. The gray cortical matter is the seat of images, and one hemisphere can substitute for the other, as in Vacquerie’s 1821 case, the sabre wounds at Landrecies, and Lamotte’s dragoon. The brain is a repeater of sensitive centres; images strive for predominance, while latent images persist obscurely.
The Ego as a Web of Events
From there Taine dismantles the Ego. It is not a substance but a continuous web of successive events. A plank chalked into triangles, rhomboids, and squares is nothing beyond its divisions; likewise the Ego is nothing beyond its events. To posit an “Ego in itself” is an optical illusion that manufactures an empty substance. At any moment the Ego is merely a group of simultaneous events—a salient sensation or a preponderant image. Classifying events as sensibility, imagination, understanding, will, and attributing faculties to the Ego is permissible and useful, but such words only mean that, given certain conditions, a sensation, image, idea, or resolution will follow. Taine illustrates with his power to recall Veronese’s Marriage at Cana, and with his perception of a table—both reducible to constant connections among events. Forces and faculties are merely properties of events to be followed by other events. This destroys the metaphysical phantom of the Ego, one of the last verbal entities surviving from scholastic philosophy, alongside matter. Verbal entities persist only in psychology (self and faculties) and in physics (matter and primitive forces), and in France this illusion has obstructed psychology—hence Condillac, James Mill, and an English philosopher’s “pictured hook” remark. Extending the analysis to matter, Taine argues force and substance are verbal entities there too, citing Boscovich, Ampère, Poisson, Cauchy, and Renouvier. Only events, their conditions and dependences, remain. Personality connects to the physiological individual, psychological and physiological aspects distinguished, with Claude Bernard and Landry invoked. Nervous centres, sympathetic ganglia, marrow, and encephalon show graduated independence in the triton, frog, insects, the Mantis religiosa (Dugès), annelids, leeches, Polyophthalmus, and zoophytes. The web of events constituting the self is the most complex and predominant series among analogous series.
Rectification and the Final State of the Image
The image, once rectified, ceases to appear as an actual sensation and also as a past or future one; it is then pronounced a simple image, and rectification is complete. Such are “pure conceptions,” “pure imaginations,” “pure ideas.” Reading or hearing a sentence, dreaming, or forming projects, we picture rooms, landscapes, persons, incidents, knowing them imaginary, supposititious, of our own fabrication. Apart from external perceptions, recollections, and previsions, waking thought is made of pure images. Thinking of an old time-piece, following a train of reasoning by mental words, reflecting on probable consequences, we have images of the time-piece, of sounds and vocal movements, of gestures and events—yet know them all as simple present images. The hallucination is wholly checked; the internal phantasmagoria appears only as phantasmagoria.
Two extreme cases frame this. First, the image as a reduced, impoverished recollection: originally full and circumstantial—I have seen the time-piece a hundred times, heard the mental words many times—once I could recall the fire-place where it stood in childhood, the name of the person who made the gesture, the title of the book. Take the Latin word securis: on the day I learnt it I could recall the grammar or dictionary, the place, line, and page of the dog’s-eared, blotted school-book. Repetition and distance have effaced these circumstances. The image no longer attaches to any link of anterior experience; it lacks re-entering and salient angles, anterior or posterior extremities, so it cannot blend with another determinate event. It moves about colourlessly; if placed in childhood, it is by conjecture and reasoning. Its future position is likewise unstable, subject to my changing will. Opposed to affirmative judgments, previsions, and recollections, it undergoes repression of contradictory sensations and is contradicted absolutely, appearing only as a sensation without situation—simply apparent and destitute of real existence.
The inverse case: precise, intense, coloured representations attained by great artists—Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Henri Heine, Edgar Poe. These attain moments of hallucination, but only for the moment. Flaubert writes that the artist’s mental vision must not be assimilated to strict hallucination: in strict hallucination there is always fear, you feel your personality escaping, you think you are about to die; in poetic vision there is pleasure, something entering into you, though one loses consciousness of where he is. The vision often completes itself slowly, piece by piece, like parts of a decoration put together; often it is sudden and fugitive, like hallucinations preceding sleep—something passes before your eyes, to be seized greedily on the spot. Taine’s own experience accords: as landscape, figure, gesture, and voice become precise, we wait and hold the breath; sometimes all appears suddenly, sometimes slowly with barren intervals.
The Education of the Senses
Taine asks whether anything real stands behind our illusions, and answers that bodies are internal phantoms—fragments of the Ego that only appear detached, though they remain the Ego under another aspect. The sensible universe is each person’s involuntary creation. No sensation sits where we place it; many feel foreign though they belong to us. Illusion saturates every judgment, outer and inner alike, which is why the Buddhist philosopher reduces the Real to momentary events of his Ego. Yet analysis can rebuild: illusions lead us to truths.
For sensations we attribute to ourselves but project onto organs—taste, smell, contact, pressure, muscular contraction, pain, heat, cold—the nervous disturbance’s real position corresponds proportionately to the sensation’s apparent position, so a false judgment lands on the same conclusion as a true one. The mind hits the mark though its aim is bad. This comes from harmony, not coincidence: sensation links to disturbance at the nerve’s extremity, fixing a constant association of images. One source yields two consequences, the mental illusion and the nervous disturbance, and so they correspond.
Sounds and colors projected beyond us obey the same rule: to a sound corresponds a vibration of air; to color, differences of structure in the illuminated surface. Except in rare subjective sensations of ear and eye, the correspondence is perfect. Our judgment, false in itself, is almost invariably true by correspondence. The illusion proceeds from education, education from laws connecting sensation’s origin to an external condition. External perception is an accurate hallucination; to the transient phantom corresponds a permanent Possibility and Necessity—a group of relations between conditions and sensations. That law’s permanence makes us imagine substance, its efficacy force—convenient symbols only. Hallucination proper occurs when the announced thing is not accomplished. The mechanism resembles digestion or walking—apparently simple, really complex. A brown leather book three paces off: color sensation and muscular sensations are crude materials; coupling of images makes the color appear an extended patch, then solid, then permanent matter.
The Knowledge of Mind
We reach the unextended centre each calls “I.” The Ego is affirmed as a being, permanent, bound to a particular organized body. Its qualities are capacities and faculties—feeling, perceiving, recollecting, imagining, desiring, willing. Faculty and capacity are relative terms equivalent to power, stating that conditions of events are present. A power is nothing in itself except an aspect of events—their possibility because conditions are given. What is actually in me is a series of successive events and states. Ideas have a double face: cognition and emotion. Sensations localized in our bodies appear internal because not projected beyond our body; our body is our first movable thing and immediate precinct. Past events form a continuous chain; abbreviations of memory collect long series into single images. The stable within is what each calls “I”—compared to passing events, a substance. Metaphysical illusion conceives it as distinct and independent. The Ego is a force as bodies are—a within relative to their without. False recollections may insert themselves: Balzac described a white horse to Madame de Girardin intended for Sandeau, then believed he had given it. Legends form thus; a peasant saw his dead sister’s soul (actually phosphorescence near spirits of wine); a Smyrna guide’s miracle reduced to a small cloud. Dreams produce false recollections, as did the author’s dream of an album and an imaginary unfavorable article. Monomaniacs at Salpetriere form romances composing their past lives.
Names as Substitutes for General Characters
Abstract ideas are formed through names functioning as substitutes for general characters. A name acquires meaning through a double exclusive attachment: it is called up by all individuals of a class and calls them up in turn, attaching only to what they share—the abstract character. The name replaces the sensible representation of that character and performs the same functions; forming ideas is nothing more than forming names.
A child is shown a dog while hearing “bow-wow”; repetition permanently associates the two images. This associative power alone is not unique to humans—foxes, sporting dogs, and parrots possess comparable associations. What is peculiar to man is that the associated sound is called up not only by similar individuals but by strikingly different ones: the child says “bow-wow” to terriers, mastiffs, Newfoundlands, then to a pasteboard barking dog, a wheeled dog, a bronze dog, a cousin crawling on all fours, and finally a picture of a dog. Taine watched a two-year-old cry “bow-wow” fifty-three times in succession at dogs painted on a lamp-shade. Philology reveals the same operation in primitive word-meanings; Oken, Goethe, and Newton repeated the child’s mental operation. The difference between man and animal, and between superior and ordinary minds, reduces to seizing more delicate analogies. The child receives words but creates their meanings, requiring continuous rectification; Mr. Lieber’s account of “nim” illustrates this. Scientific research then corrects general ideas against the general characters of things: anatomy multiplies the body’s characters; chemistry and physics expand the idea of water; the discovery of potassium and sodium added a new character. Ideas are corrected by addition and subtraction—whales removed from fishes, cetacea and cheiroptera added to mammals. The leaf-idea in botany and the mammalian skeleton type exemplify purified general characters. A new section begins on general ideas which are models—arithmetic, geometry, mechanics—constructed without regard to whether nature corresponds, starting with the notion of unity as the aptitude to enter a collection.
Induction, Causation, and the Foundations of Geometry
Dew formation opens the examination. Polished substances that conduct heat poorly are most strongly dewed, while good conductors resist dew, suggesting dew deposition connects to a body’s power of resisting heat passage. Rough surfaces complicate this law: roughened iron, especially painted or blackened, dews sooner than varnished paper. Using the Method of Difference to vary surface states reveals a second scale—surfaces radiating heat most readily contract dew most copiously. Texture introduces a third scale: close, firm textures are unfavorable, while loose textures favor dew. This third cause resolves into the first, since loose substances impede heat passage. Instances of heavy dew agree only in radiating heat rapidly or conducting it slowly. The doubt whether coldness causes dew or is its effect is resolved: coldness is accounted for independently, so coldness causes dew. Three corroborations follow: deduction from laws of aqueous vapor; direct experiment by cooling surfaces; and a natural experiment where clouds withdrawing cause dew to begin.
Laws concerning possible things require collecting many instances; the more general the law, the more time needed. Newton, Geoffrey, Saint-Hilaire, Dalton, and Faraday succeed many others; the Conservation of Force is recent. Verified laws become only probable outside observed space and time—gravitation beyond Herschel’s nebulae, chemical affinity in the sun. Deductive sciences yield propositions certain beyond our world; two plus three make five everywhere. Their most general propositions are discovered first. Axioms are undemonstrated propositions at the head of sciences—those whose analysis is complete (identity, contradiction) and those requiring brief analysis (alternative). The passage analyzes the axioms that equal magnitudes added to or subtracted from equal magnitudes yield equal sums or remainders, first inductively, then analytically through definitions of equality as sameness. It examines Euclid’s twelve axioms, the straight line’s definition, and parallel lines, arguing these axioms are theorems capable of proof, citing D’Alembert on the scandal of elementary geometry.
Key Ideas
The reduction of quality to quantity runs through Taine’s treatment of the senses. Sounds arrange themselves in a pyramid, deep sounds at the base and acute at the summit, because the elementary sensation is longer or shorter and its maxima more distant or closer; intensity corresponds to degrees of condensation in the air wave, and tone to supplementary harmonics—the same note on different instruments being a fundamental plus superior harmonics, with covered organ pipes and the clarionet giving only odd ones. Sight requires at least three elementary sensations—red, violet, green—each excited differently by every ray, their varying intensities producing the spectral colors and their equal force producing white. Smell and taste resist complete reduction because their mode of action is chemical rather than undulatory, and their elements remain unknown; what we call a smell or taste is complex, including sensations of touch and accompanying sensations from the alimentary canal.
The Ego is another of Taine’s targets. It is not a substance but a continuous web of successive events. Using the analogy of a plank chalked into triangles, rhomboids, and squares, he argues that the plank is nothing beyond its divisions; likewise the Ego is nothing beyond its events. To posit an “Ego in itself” is an optical illusion creating an empty substance. At any moment the Ego is merely a group of simultaneous events—a salient sensation or preponderant image. Classifying events as sensibility, imagination, understanding, and will is permissible and useful, but these words only mean that, given certain conditions, a sensation, image, idea, or resolution will follow. This destroys the metaphysical phantom of the Ego, one of the last verbal entities surviving from scholastic philosophy, alongside matter. Taine extends the same analysis to matter, arguing that force and substance are verbal entities there too, citing Boscovich, Ampère, Poisson, Cauchy, and Renouvier. Only events, their conditions and dependences, remain.
Localization is invariably false. Sensations occur in the sensory centres of the encephalon but appear situated elsewhere—at the spot where touch can check or modify them. Amputees continue throughout life to feel tingling and pain in lost limbs; a man whose thigh was amputated twelve years earlier still felt toes and sole, and pressure on the ischiatic nerve made the leg seem asleep. The law is that a sensation appears situated where we are accustomed to meet its usual cause or condition. Colors seem properties of objects though they exist only in the optic centres. Localization requires experience; the tactile-muscular atlas precedes the visual one. Yet the false judgment yields the same conclusion as a true one: the mind hits the mark though its aim is bad. External perception is an accurate hallucination; to the transient phantom corresponds a permanent Possibility and Necessity—a group of relations between conditions and sensations. Hallucination proper occurs when the announced thing is not accomplished.
Explanation, for Taine, proceeds by identifying an explanatory intermediate contained in the first datum of a law and connecting it to the second. In arithmetic, the intermediate explaining divisibility by nine is a character included in all elements except the first and common to all units represented by a digit placed to the left of the first. In geometry, a construction replaces the polygon with triangles, and the intermediate is a character common to all of them. In biology, from Galen to Cuvier and Richard Owen, naturalists discovered an intermediate common to all parts of an organism: the property of being useful. Cuvier’s formula is quoted—the form of the tooth involves that of the condyle, omoplate, and talons, as an equation of a curve involves all its properties. The voracious cockchafer larva has a vast muscular stomach with three crowns of ceca; as an adult cockchafer, only a slender canal remains. The intermediate is always a character or sum of characters included in the first datum, more general than that datum when considered apart, and accessible by isolation and extraction. Demonstration then becomes a syllogism arranged according to comprehension rather than extension, so that reasoning is an analysis rather than a logical trick.
Themes
The book’s deepest theme is that illusion is not the opposite of knowledge but its instrument. Illusions lead us to truths. For sensations we attribute to ourselves but project to organs, the nervous disturbance’s real position corresponds proportionately to the sensation’s apparent position, so a false judgment yields the same conclusion as a true one. Two consequences flow from one source—the mental illusion and the nervous disturbance—so they correspond. The illusion proceeds from education, and education from laws connecting sensation’s origin to an external condition. The sensible universe is each person’s involuntary creation, a set of internal phantoms, fragments of the Ego detached in appearance but fundamentally the Ego under another aspect. This is why the Buddhist philosopher reduces the Real to momentary events of his Ego—and why analysis can nevertheless reconstruct the world from those events.
A second theme is the continuity between sanity and madness, waking and dreaming. Taine’s balance metaphor governs the whole: in normal wakefulness, sensations outweigh images; in illness, the weight passes to images, producing hallucination; when a thread links weights across the scales, illusion results. Recollections and general judgments form a cohesive reductive group that pulls the mind back—his own dream of drawing off boots in company, reduced upon waking by returning recollections and the judgment “It is a dream.” The gendarme S., haunted after a March 1862 execution by the bleeding head, dreamed of condemnation by the Minister of War, heard a clock voice saying he must die, fled, hid, fired on comrades, and recovered by the seventh. The mind is a polypus of interdependent sensations and images, with equilibrium constituting reasonable wakefulness. Poetic vision and strict hallucination are similar events contrasted in antecedents and consequents: the first is the harmonious product of all united human tendencies, voluntary, breakable, negatived at any moment by perception of the real world; the second is the exaggerated enlargement of a discordant element, like a hypertrophied organ subtracted from general life. Suppress the repressive peculiarities—suspend ordinary sensations and the cohesion of connected recollections, as in sleep—and the simple idea becomes first an hypnagogic hallucination, then an intense dream. Prolong the momentary ecstasy, let it repeat itself suddenly and unwatched for, and you have the visions of a madman in asylums, or of a mystic like those of India or the Middle Ages.
A third theme is the continuity of the human person with the physiological individual. Taine describes nervous centres, the sympathetic ganglia, marrow, and encephalon, and the graduated independence of centres in the triton, the frog, insects, the Mantis religiosa, annelids, leeches, Polyophthalmus, and zoophytes. The web of events constituting the self is the most complex and predominant series among analogous series. The distinction between psychological and physiological aspects is drawn with reference to Claude Bernard and Landry. The human person is not a ghost in a machine but the highest integration of a nervous organization whose parts retain their own partial lives.
Why It Matters
Taine’s book matters because it takes seriously the proposition that psychology can be a science of facts without ceasing to be philosophy. The reduction of faculties to events, of general ideas to names, of the Ego to a web of successive states, and of explanation to the extraction of an intermediate character—each of these moves is carried through with a consistency that later thinkers would either inherit or react against. The analysis of hallucination and poetic vision, grounded in cases from Esquirol, Baillarger, Maury, and the author’s own experience, anticipates the clinical and phenomenological study of the imagination. The insistence that localization is learned, that the tactile-muscular atlas precedes the visual one, and that external perception is an accurate hallucination, belongs to the prehistory of the psychology of perception. And the closing treatment of demonstration—the syllogism rearranged according to comprehension, the axiom as a theorem capable of proof, D’Alembert’s scandal of elementary geometry—shows Taine working at the boundary between logic and the philosophy of mathematics. The book is demanding, unsentimental, and relentlessly analytical; but it is also, in its own way, an attempt to describe the mind from the inside, with the patience of a naturalist and the eye of a painter.
