[3] In his preface to his Thesis _Liberté et Déterminisme_, later editions, p. vii.
We find in the thought of our period a very striking development or change in regard to the problem of freedom. Beginning with a strictly positivist and naturalist belief in determinism, it concludes with a spiritualism or idealism which not only upholds freedom but goes further in its reaction against the determinist doctrines by maintaining contingency.
Taine and Renan both express the initial attitude, a firm belief in determinism, but it is most clear and rigid in the work of Taine. His whole philosophy is hostile to any belief in freedom. The strictly positivist, empiricist and naturalist tone of his thought combined with the powerful influence of Spinoza’s system to produce in him a firm belief in necessity—a necessity which, as we have seen, was severely rational and of the type seen in mathematics and in logic. Although it must also be admitted that in this view of change and development Taine was partly influenced by the Hegelian philosophy, yet his formulations were far more precise and mathematical than those of the German thinker.
We have, in considering his attitude to science, seen the tenacious manner in which he clings to his dogma of causality or universal necessity. All living things, man included, are held in the firm grip of “the steel pincers of necessity.” Every fact and every law in the universe has its _raison explicative_, as Taine styles it. He quotes with approval, in his treatment of this question at the close of his work _De l’Intelligence_, the words of the great scientist and positivist Claude Bernard: “_Il y a un déterminisme absolu, dans les conditions d’existence des phénomènes naturels, aussi bien pour les corps vivants que pour les corps bruts_.”[4] In Taine and the school of scientists like Bernard, whose opinions on this matter he voices, no room is accorded to freedom.
[4] _De l’Intelligence_, vol. 2, p. 480, the quotation from Bernard is to be found in his _Introduction à l’Etude de la Médecine expérimentale_, p. 115.
Taine’s belief in universal necessity and his naturalistic outlook led him to regard man from the physical standpoint as a mechanism, from the mental point of view a theorem. Vice and virtue are, to quote his own words, “products just as vitriol or sugar.” This remark having appeared to many thinkers a scandalous assertion, Taine explained in an article contributed to the _Journal des Débats_[5] that he did not mean to say that vice and virtue were, like vitriol or sugar, _chemical_ but they are nevertheless products, _moral_ products, which moral elements bring into being by their assemblage. And, he argues, just as it is necessary in order to make vitriol to know the chemical elements which go to its composition, so in order to create in man the hatred of a lie it is useful to search for the psychological elements which, by their union, produce truthfulness.