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