will is not all man; man has, so to say, three lives superimposed but very
closely inter-united and which cannot do without one another: the life of
sensation, the life of will, and the life of love. The life of sensation is
almost passive, with a commencement of activity which consists in
classifying and organizing the sensations; the life of will is properly
speaking the "human" life; the life of love is the life of activity and yet
again of will, but which unites the human with the divine life. By the
ingenious and profound subtlety of his analyses, Maine de Biran has placed
himself in the front rank of French thinkers and, in any case, he is one of
the most original.

VICTOR COUSIN AND HIS DISCIPLES.--Victor Cousin, who appears to have
been influenced almost concurrently by Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, and
the German philosophy, yielded rapidly to a tendency which is
characteristically French and is also, perhaps, good, and which consists in
seeing "some good in all the opinions," and he was eclectic, that is, a
borrower. His maxim, which he had no doubt read in Leibnitz, was that the
systems are "true in what they affirm and false in what they deny."
Starting thence, he rested upon both the English and German philosophy,
correcting one by the other. Personally his tendency was to make
metaphysics come from philosophy and to prove God by the human soul and the
relations of God with the world by the relations of man with matter. To him
God is always an augmented human soul. All philosophies, not to mention all
religions, have rather an inclination to consider things thus: but this
tendency is particularly marked in Cousin. In the course of his career,
which was diversified, for he was at one time a professor and at another a
statesman, he varied somewhat, because before 1830 he became very Hegelian,
and after 1830 he harked back towards Descartes, endeavouring especially to
make philosophic instruction a moral priesthood; highly cautious, very
well-balanced, feeling great distrust of the unassailable temerities of the