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Updated: May 14, 2025
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. MAINE DE BIRAN. Maine de Biran was a renovator.
Another, found by M. Renan in Phoenicia itself, is made up of glass beads imitating pearls, intermixed with beads of cornaline and agate. Another class of glass ornaments consists of small flat plaques or plates, pierced with a number of fine holes, which appear to have been sewn upon garments.
He had himself just published Marc Aurele, and Doctor Hatch's subject was closely akin to that of his own Hibbert Lectures. I remember seeing him emerge from the porch of St. Mary's, his strange, triangular face pleasantly dreamy. "You were interested?" said some one at his elbow. "Mais oui!" said M. Renan, smiling. "He might have given my lecture, and I might have preached his sermon!
Renan once wrote a story of the French Revolution, "The Abbess Juarre," in which his thesis was that if warning were given that the world would end in three days the entire population of the globe would give itself over to an orgy of sex; sex being life itself. It is the obsession of the doomed consumptive, the doomed spinster, the last thought of a man with the rope round his neck.
Nor is their history merely the dead bones of analysis and research; it is informed with an untiring sympathy; and in the case of Renan especially a suave and lucid style adds the charm and amenity which art alone can give. The same tendencies appear to a still more remarkable degree in Criticism.
I should say, rather, that literature resembles painting in being one of the fine arts, and that when a book, like a picture, is a fine work of art, it has a great chance of being a commercial success. Renan's books have been very successful literary speculations, because Renan is a first-rate artist.
Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand 'under the shelter of the wall, as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world.
When you find a life entirely incredible and incomprehensible from the outside, you pretend that you understand the inside. As Renan, the rationalist, could not make any sense out of Christ's most public acts, he proceeded to make an ingenious system out of His private thoughts.
At present I never leave my house, in order not to meet with fresh scenes of horror... Since my whole soul revolts against such infamy ... I will no longer maintain my connection with the scene of such crimes.” Little wonder that a man as far-famed as Renan should, in his “Les Apôtres” have characterized the hideous butchery perpetrated in a single day, during the great massacre of Ṭihrán, as “a day perhaps unparalleled in the history of the world!”
Rogers seems to complain of M. Renan for "quietly assuming" that miracles are invariably to be rejected. Certainly a historian of the present day who should not make such an assumption would betray his lack of the proper qualifications for his profession. It is not considered necessary for every writer to begin his work by setting out to prove the first principles of historical criticism.
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