THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: FRANCE


The Eclectic School: Victor Cousin.

The Positivist School: Auguste Comte.

The Kantist School: Renouvier.

Independent and Complex Positivists: Taine, Renan.


LAROMIGUIERE: ROYER-COLLARD.--Emerging from the school of Condillac,
France saw Laromiguiere who was a sort of softened Condillac, less
trenchant, and not insensible to the influence of Rousseau; but he was
little more than a clear and elegant professor of philosophy. Royer-Collard
introduced into France the Scottish philosophy (Thomas Reid, Dugald
Stewart) and did not depart from it or go beyond it; but he set it forth
with magnificent authority and with a remarkable invention of clear and
magisterial formulae.

MAINE DE BIRAN.--Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself
to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been
interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of _ego_. In full
reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to
the _ego_; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of
sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon,
elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for
Descartes, but from a fresh point of view, the voluntary deed is the
primitive deed of the soul and the will is the foundation of man. Also, the