Maine de Biran’s philosophical reputation has suffered from two causes—the obscure, laboured quality of his style, and the unfortunate mode of publication of his writings. In all his work there is evidence of thorough originality of thinking, but in the expression of his thoughts this very originality is so far a disadvantage in that it imposes on him a mode of exposition little calculated to attract and retain the attention of a reader. During his life, moreover, but few, and these the least characteristic of his works, were formally published. An essay on habit (Sur VInfluence de l'Habitude, 1803), a critical review of Laromiguière’s lectures (1817), and the philosophical portion of the article Leibnitz in the Biographie Universelle (1819) appeared during his lifetime. A long memoir on the analysis of thought (Sur la Décomposition de la Pensée), crowned by the Institute in 1805, was. sent to press, but, for some reason, was not finally printed. His manuscripts, very large in quantity, were not made accessible in their entirety to Cousin when that writer desired to prepare a collective edition of De Biran’s works. Tn 1834 the writings above enumerated, together with the important essay entitled Nouvelles considerations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, were published by Cousin, and in 1841 there were added three volumes by the same editor, under the title Oeuvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran. The manuscripts from which Cousin had prepared this edition were, however, in a most imperfect condition, and it was known that some memoirs to which De Biran attached the greatest importance were still in obscurity. In 1845 a large mass of manuscript was placed by De Biran’s son in the hands of F. Μ. E. Naville. The labour of preparing these for publication, interrupted by the death of Naville in 1846, was continued by his son, E. Naville, and completed, with the aid of Μ. Debrit, in 1859. The Oeuvres inédites de Μ. de Biran, 3 vols., rendered it possible for the first time to obtain a connected view of a very remarkable monument of philosophical development. In these volumes the most important work is that entitled Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l'étude de la nature, which represents the completest stage of De Biran’s thinking. A later stage is represented by the fragments of a projected work entitled Nouveaux Essais d' Anthropologie, in which the psychology of the earlier treatise is developed in the direction of a somevdιat mystical metaphysic.

De Biran’s first essays in philosophy were written avowedly from the point of view of Locke and Condillac, but even in them he was brought to signalize the essential fact on which his later speculation turns. Dealing with the formation of habits, he is compelled to note that passive impressions, however transformed, do not furnish a complete or adequate explanation. With Laromiguière he distinguishes attention as an active effort, of no less importance than the passive receptivity of sense, and with Butler distinguishes passively formed customs from active habits. Prolonged meditation, evidenced in the occasional writings, prize essays, and the like of the subsequent years, brought him to the far-reaching conclusion that Condillac’s notion of passive receptivity as the one source of conscious experience was not only an error in fact but an error of method,—in short, that the mechanical mode of viewing consciousness as formed by external influence was fallacious and deceptive. For it he proposed to substitute the genetic method, whereby human conscious experience might be exhibited as growing or developing from its essential basis in connexion with external conditions. The essential basis he finds in the real consciousness of self as an active striving power, and the stages of its development, corresponding to what one may call the relative importance of the external conditions and the reflective clearness of self-consciousness, he designates as the affective, the perceptive, and the reflective. These stages are characterized with much skill and psychological acuteness, and in connexion therewith De Biran treats most of the obscure problems which arise in dealing with conscious experience, such as the mode by which the organism is cognized, the mode by which the organism is distinguished from extra-organic things, and the nature of those general ideas by which the relations of things are known to us—cause, power, force, &c. His views are always suggestive, and the best recent psychology in France is but a reproduction of some of them.

In the latest stage of his speculation De Biran distinguishes the animal existence from the human, under which the three forms above noted are classed, and both from the life of the spirit, in which human thought is brought into relation with the supersensible, divine system of things. This stage, as above said, is left imperfect. Altogether De Biran’s work presents a very remarkable specimen of deep metaphysical thinking directed by preference to the psychological aspect of experience. It is almost a solitary instance of an effort to treat psychology in a wide and philosophical manner.

The Oeuvres inédites of De Biran by Naville contain an introductory study. Special monographs on him are—Merten, Étude critique sur Maine de Biran, 1865; E. Naville, Maine de Biran, sa vie et ses pensées, 2d ed., 1874; Gérard, Maine de Biran, essai sur sa philosophie, 1876.