Rising to a higher point of view than that to which he had confined
himself in studying France, M. Taine regarded its metamorphosis as a
case of transformation as general as the passage of the Cit? antique
over to the Roman Empire over to the feudal State. Now, as formerly,
this transformation is the effect of a "change in the intellectual and
physical condition of men"; that is to say, in other words, in the
environment that surrounds them. Such is the advent of a new
geological period, of a glacial period, for example, or, more
precisely, "the very slow and then accelerated upheaval of a
continent, forcing the submarine species which breathe by gills to
transform themselves into species which breathe by lungs." It is
impossible to divine in what sense this adaptation takes place if we
do not comprehend the event, that is to say if we do not perceive its
starting-point and the innate force which produces it. According to
Taine, this force, in the present case, is the progress the increasing
authority of positive, verifiable science. What a definition he would
have given of science and its essence! What a tableau of its progress,
the man whose thought was matured at the moment when the scientific
spirit entered into history and literature; who breathed it in his
youth with the fervid and sacred enthusiasm of a poet seeing the world
grow brighter and intelligible to him, and who, at the age of twenty-
five, demanded of it a method and introduced this into criticism and
psychology in order to give these new life - the mechanical equivalent
of heat, natural selection, spectroscopic analysis, the theory of the
microbes, recent discoveries in physics and the constitution of
matter, research into historic origins, psychological explanation of
texts, extension of oriental researches, discoveries of prehistoric
conditions, comparative study of barbaric communities - every grand
idea of the century to which he has himself contributed, all those by
which science embraces a larger and larger portion of the universe, he
saw them containing the same essence; all combining to change the
conception of the world and substitute another, coherent and logical
in the best minds, but then confused and disfigured as it slowly
descends to the level of the crowd.
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