Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/692

676 the true source of human dignity, of liberty, of modern democracy, but the conception of an infinite power, before which all men are equal? 'There must be,' says M. Littré, 'some spiritual bond of humanity, without which society would lapse into isolated families or hordes, and be no real society at all.' This spiritual bond, which he placed in a sort of subordinate religion of humanity, can only consist in the lofty conception of the infinite, because the spiritual bond must be one with the mystery of the world."

The genius of M. Littré was essentially analytical. In that spirit he delighted to trace the uses of words and language to their roots and filaments; and he performed that task with consummate ability. But we discover in his writings no power of constructive reasoning. On the contrary, he was apt to mistake mere reveries and phantasms for the laws that govern society and the human mind. Thus in 1850 he announced "that peace for the next five-and-twenty years was foreseen by sociology, and, indeed, that peace was to last throughout the present period of transition, at the end of which a republican confederation would unite the west of Europe and put an end to armed conflicts." In 1878 he was obliged to confess that all bis forecasts were mere delusions. In the interval four wars had broken out, and the great monarchies of Germany and Italy had consolidated their power at the expense of France. We have a profound respect for M. Littré as a philologist, but he certainly was not a politician nor a philosopher. That new-fangled term "sociology" covers a multitude of false speculations and puerile blunders.

M. Taine is not a disciple of Auguste Comte, and he professes no great respect for that positive philosopher. He is rather a follower of Condillac and the skeptics of the last century; and, as we have had occasion to point out in reviewing his works, he attributes, like the late Mr. Buckle, a sovereign power to matter over mind, and to external circumstances over the formation of individual and national character. We have not forgotten his caricature of English literature, which he ascribes to the carnivorous tastes of the Anglo-Saxon. He judges of the genius of a nation by its diet and its climate. On the occasion of his own reception at the Academy, in January, 1880, M. Taine delivered an éloge of his predecessor, M. de Loménie, which is really a masterpiece, unexceptionable in taste and style. No one has drawn a more faithful and graceful picture of the French society of the last generation, such as gathered round Madame Récamier at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. But these things have passed away. M. Dumas, the eminent chemist, in his reply to the new academician, touched on the vagaries of a more recent period, and did not leave M. Taine's materialist philosophy unnoticed.

He told him that "the fanatics of the naturalist school, upsetting language and placing the physical above the moral side of things, contend that, to judge of a man's work, you must trace his innermost life,