l and Comte, and his
fundamental dogma was the denial of free will and the absolute
dominion of physical causes over the life of mankind. A violent effort
to shape the future by intention and design, and not by causes that
are in the past, seemed to him the height of folly. The idea of
starting fresh, from the morrow of creation, of emancipating the
individual from the mass, the living from the dead, was a defiance of
the laws of nature. Man is civilised and trained by his surroundings,
his ancestry, his nationality, and must be adapted to them. The
natural man, whom the Revolution discovered and brought to the
surface, is, according to Taine, a vicious and destructive brute, not
to be tolerated unless caught young, and perseveringly disciplined and
controlled.

Taine is not a historian, but a pathologist, and his work, the most
scientific we possess, and in part the most exhaustive, is not
history. By his energy in extracting formulas and accumulating
knowledge, by the crushing force with which he masses it to sustain
conclusions, he is the strongest Frenchman of his time, and his
indictment is the weightiest that was ever drawn up. For he is no
defender of the Monarchy or of the Empire, and his cruel judgments
are not dictated by party. His book is one of the ablest that this
generation has produced. It is no substitute for history. The
consummate demonstrator, concentrated on the anatomy of French brains,
renounces much that we need to be told, and is incompetent as to the
literature and the general affairs of Europe. Where Taine failed Sorel
has magnificently succeeded, and he has occupied the vacant place both
at the Academy and in his undisputed primacy among writers on the
Revolution. He is secretary to the Senate, and is not an abstract
philosopher, but a politician, curious about things that get into
newspapers and attract the public gaze. Instead of investigating the
human interior, he is on the look-out across the Alps and beyond the
Rhine, writing, as it were, from the point of view of the Foreign
Office. He is at his best when his pawns are diplomatists. In the
process of home politics, and the development of political ideas, he
does not surpass those who went before him. Coming after Sybel, he is
somewhat ahead of him in documentary resource. He is more friendly to
the principles of the Revolution, without being an apologist, and is
more cheerful, more sanguine, and pleasanter to read. A year ago I
said