The Modern Regime, vol 2 | Page 5

actual facts which dominate the rest and which
determine the order and structure of modern society. As he had given a
picture of old France he aimed to portray France as it now is, with its
various groups, - village, small town and large city, - with its categories
of men, peasants, workmen, bourgeois, functionaries and capitalists;
with the forces that impel each class along, their passions, their ideas,
their desires. Besides the numerical statistics of person he meant to
have set forth the moral statistics of souls. According to him,
psychological conditions exist which render the social activity of men
possible or impossible. And, especially, "in a given society, there is
always a psychological state which provokes the state of that society."
It was his aim to seek out in the novel, in poetry, in the arts since 1820,
that is to say in all works that throw light on the various and successive
kinds of the reigning ideal - in philosophy, in religion, in industry, in all

branches of French action and thought - the signs of the psychological
tendencies of modern Frenchman in this or that social condition. What
would this book have been? M. Taine had sketched it out so far back,
he had abandoned it for so long a time and never alluded to it, that
nothing remains by which we can form any idea of it. But, in this
undertaking demanding so much science, so much intuition, so much
experience of accurate observation, of general views and precise
generalization - in this vast study requiring such profound knowledge,
not alone of France but of societies offering points of comparison with
her, we may be certain that the author of Notes sur Paris, Notes sur
l'Angleterre, of the Ancien Régime, the critic accustomed to interpret
civilizations, literature and works of art, the thinker, in fine, who, to
prepare himself for the greatest tasks he undertook, traveled five times
over France, studying its life with the eyes of an artist, in the light of
history and of psychology, ever preceding his philosophic study with
visual investigation, would have been equal to the task.[5]
Already for several years, M. Taine, aware that his time was short, had
narrowed the limits of the work he was engaged upon. But what his
work lost in breadth and in richness of detail it would have gained in
depth and in power. All his master ideas would have been found in it,
foreshortened and concentrated. Always seeking in this or that group of
them what he called his generators, intellectual and moral as well as
political, he would have described all those which explain the French
group. Unfortunately, here again the elements are wanting which allow
one to foreshadow what this final analysis and last construction might
have been. M. Taine did not write in anticipation. Long before taking
the pen in hand he had derived his most significant facts and formed his
plan. He carried them in his brain where they fell into order of
themselves. Ten lines of notes, a few memoranda of conversations -
faint reflections, to us around him, of the great inward light - are all that
enable one to attempt an indication of the few leading conceptions were
to complete "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine."
"Le Milieu Moderne", was to have been the title of the last book. The
question here is how to discover the great characteristics of the period
into which European societies entered and about were to live. 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 Cité 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