The youthful thinker very soon, however, passed beyond the point of view of Laromiguière. Royer-Collard was lecturing in the chair of the history of modern philosophy in the faculty of letters. Cousin was very speedily attracted by him, and the teaching of Royer-Collard formed the second great philosophical impulse of his life. This teacher, as he tells us, “by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy.” In 1815-16 Cousin attained the position of suppléant or assistant to Royer-Collard in the chair of the faculty of letters. But there was still another mind which influenced the young and susceptible philosopher at this early period. This was Maine-de-Biran,— the expounder of the volitional theory of cause, and the upholder of a highly spiritual philosophy. Cousin regarded Maine de-Biran as the unequalled psychological observer of his time in France, alike in the delicacy and the depth of his analysis. All these men strongly influenced both the method and the matter of his philosophical thought. To Laromiguière he himself attributes the lesson of decomposing thought, even though the reduction of it to sensation was inadequate. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. De Biran made a special study of the phenomena of the will. He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the fact of voluntary activity, that activity in which our personality is truly revealed. It was through this “triple discipline,” as he calls it, that Cousin’s philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he entered on the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters. But the energy and impressibility of the young professor were not to be limited by the philosophical thought of his own country. He betook himself to the study of German, worked at Kant and Jacobi, and then sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Schelling. By this he was at first greatly attracted. The influence of Schelling became manifest in his teaching, and it may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. He sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason. In 1817 he went to Germany, and met Hegel at Heidelberg. In this year appeared Hegel’s Encyclopcedia of the Philosophical Sciences, of which Cousin had one of the earliest copies. He thought Hegel not particularly amiable; bub the two became friends. The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature. His contrast of Hegeland Schelling is interesting.. No two people, he tells us, can be more unlike than the master and the disciple. “Hegel lets fall words few and profound, and somewhat enigmatic; his speech is strong but embarrassed; his immovable countenance, his clouded forehead, seem the image of thought which turns back on itself. Schelling is thought developed. His language is like his look, rapid, full of éclat and life. He is naturally eloquent.”

Cousin’s future course in life as a professor of philosophy seemed now to be determined. But the political troubles of the country were to interfere for a time with this promising career. In the events of 1814-15 Cousin took the royalist side. He at first adopted the views of the party of which Royer-Collard was the philosophical chief, known as doctrinaire. He seems then to have gone further than this party, and even to have approached the extreme Left or Carbonari section of politicians. This has been alleged, though it is not in accordance with the usual moderation of his character and political views. Then came a reaction against liberalism, and in 1821-22 Cousin was deprived of his offices alike in the faculty of letters and in the Normal School. The Normal School itself was swept away. He simply shared at the hands of a narrow and illiberal Government, influenced mainly by the priesthood, the fate of Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history. Such was the spirit which actuated the fiιst restoration and the Government of Louis XVIII. This enforced abandonment of public teaching was not wholly an evil to the young speculator. He again set out for Germany with a view to further philosophical study. And here there occurred a curious episode in his life. While at Berlin in 1824-25 he was arrested and thrown into prison, either on some ill-defined political charge at the instance of the French police, or on account of certain incautious expressions which he had let fall in conversation. This imprisonment was in fact the result of the persistent persecution of the man who exercised free thought and preached toleration, at the hands of the priestly party in France, who, ruling a weak king, had already deprived the professor of his public offices. Cousin was liberated at the end of six months,—having thus for an abstract philosopher had a tolerable taste of political martyrdom. He continued under the suspicion of the French Government for three years longer. It was during this period, however, that he thought out and developed what is distinctive in his philosophical doctrine. His eclecticism, ontology, and his philosophy of history were declared in principle and in most of their salient details in the Fragmens Philosophiques of 1826. The preface to the second edition (1833) and the Avertissement to the third (1838) aimed at a vindication of his principles from hostile contemporary criticism. Even the best of his later books, the Philosophie Ecossaise, the Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien, and the Philosophie de Locke were simply matured revisions of his lectures during the period from 1815 to 1820. The lectures on Locke were first sketched in 1819, and fully developed in the course of 1829.

During the seven years of forced abandonment of teaching, he produced, besides the Fragmens, the edition of the works of Proclus (6 vols. 1820-27), and the works of Descartes (11 vols., 1826). He also commenced his Translation of Plato (13 vols.), which occupied his leisure time from 1825 to 1840.

We see in the Fragment very distinctly the fusion of the different philosophical influences of his life to which wø have referred, and by which his opinions were finally moulded and matured. For Cousin was as eclectic in cast of thought and personal habit of mind, as he was in philosophical principle and system. It is with the publication of the Fragmens of 1826 that the first great widening of his reputation is associated. In 1827 followed the Cours de l ’ Histoire de la Philosophie.

In 1828 popular feeling forced the king (Charles X.) to a change of ministry, and Μ. Martignac returned to the constitutional Charter of 1814, which sought to conciliate liberty and order, but which had been most unfaithfully worked under the restoration. A more enlightened and tolerant spirit seems to have arisen, and Μ. de Vatimesnil, minister of public instruction, recalled Cousin along with Guizot to their professorial positions in the university. Cousin’s re-appearance in the chair, “on the occasion,” as he said, “of the return of the constitutional hopes of France,” was marked by an enthusiastic demonstration on the part of students and auditors. The professoriate in Paris reached its golden age, at least in this century, when Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin were now colleagues in the faculty of letters.

The three years which followed 1828 was the period of Cousin’s greatest distinction and triumph as a lecturer. He re-appeared in sympathy with the national feeling of the time; he had suffered for his adherence to popular principles; his return to the chair was at once a compensation for what he had undergone, and the symbol of the triumph of constitutional ideas. This prepared a ready sympathy for him. The hall of the Sorbonne was crowded with auditors as the hall of no philosophical teacher in Paris had been since the days of Abelard. The lecturer had a singular power of identifying himself for the time with the system which he expounded, and the historical character he pourtray el. Clear and comprehensive in the grasp of the general outlines of his subject, he was at the same time exceedingly methodical and vivid in the representation of details. In exposition he had the rare art of unfolding and aggrandizing. Beginning with the simple or particular, he proceeded readily and easily to complete the listener’s grasp of the matter in hand. There was a rich deep-toned resonant eloquence mingled with the speculative exposition; his style of expression was clear, elegant, and forcible, abounding in happy turns and striking antitheses. To this was joined a singular power of rhetorical climax. His philosophy exhibited in a striking manner the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and its logical need of grouping details round central principles. The pretension even to grasp and formalize the history of philosophy was dazzling to the imagination of a Parisian auditory, however little ground it might have in fact or reason.

There was withal a moral earnestness and elevation in his spiritual philosophy which came home to the hearts of his hearers, and which seemed to afford a ground for higher development in national literature and art, and even in politics, than the traditional philosophy of France had appeared capable of yielding. It was thus not to be wondered at that the philosophical orator was received with enthusiasm, and that his lectures produced more ardent disciples, imbued at least with his spirit, than it has been the fortune of any other professor of philosophy in France to gather round him in this century. Tested by the power and effect of his teaching influence, Victor Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi and Schelling in Germany and Dugald Stewart in Scotland, have united the rare gifts of speculative, expository, and imaginative faculty. Tested even by the strength of the reaction which his writings have in some cases occasioned, his influence is hardly less remarkable, and the degree of petulant detraction to which he himself and his philosophy have been subjected even in France may be taken as the tribute of envy to his power. The taste for philosophy,—especially its history,—was revived in France to an extent unknown since the 17th century.

Among the more distinguished men who were influenced by the teaching and example of Cousin, and who have carried on philosophical work in his manner and spirit, we may note Jouffroy, Damiron, Garnier, Barthelemy St Hilaire, Ravaisson, Rémusat, Jules Simon, and Franck. Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow students, and then auditors and disciples. Jouffroy, however, always kept firm to the early—the French and Scottish—impulses of Cousin’s teaching. The best research in the history of philosophy, and the best thought of France during the period from 1830 to 1848, were doubtless due to the teaching and writings of Cousin. In fact, for fully fifty years of the philosophical life of France, Cousin has been the greatest power. He continued to lecture regularly for two years and a half after his return to the chair. The three bloody days of July 1830 led to the flight of Charles X. This was followed by the accession of Louis Philippe, “by the will of the people,”—which meant very much the bourgeoisie of Paris and the middle class of tho country. Cousin sympathized entirely with the revolution of July, and he was at once recognized by the new Government as a friend of national liberty and constitutional rights. Writing in June 1833 he explains both his philosophical and his political position :—

“I had the advantage of holding united against me for many years, both the sensational and the theological school. In 1830 both schools descended into the arena of politics. The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order the better to reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy. On the other hand, he who combated any exclusive principle in science was bound to reject also any exclusive principle in the state, and to defend representative government.”

The Government was not tardy in honouring his public services as a professor and bis contributions to the philosophical literature of the country. He was induced by the ministry of which his friend Guizot was the head to take a part in national administration. He ceased to lecture, but retained the title of professor of philosophy. He became a member of the council of public instruction and counsellor of state, and in 1832 he was made a peer of France. Finally, he accepted the position of minister of public instruction in 1840 under Thiers. He was besides director of the Normal School and virtual head of the university, and from 1840 a member of the Institute (Academy of the Moral and Political Sciences). His character and his official position at this period gave him great power in the university and in the educational arrangements of the country. In fact, during the seventeen and a half years of the reign of Louis Philippe, Cousin mainly moulded the philosophical and even the literary tendencies of the cultivated class in France.

But the most important work he accomplished during this period was doubtless the organization of primary instruction in the country. It was to the efforts of Cousin that France owed her advance, in primary education, from 1830 to 1848. Prussia and Saxony had set the national example, and France was guided into it by Cousin. Forgetful, as has been well said, of “national calamity and of personal wrong,” he looked to Prussia as affording the best example of an organized system of national education; and he was persuaded that “to carry back the education of Prussia into France afforded a nobler (if a bloodless) triumph than the trophies of Austerlitz and Jena.” In the summer of 1831, commissioned by the Government, he proceeded to Germany, visiting Frankfort and Saxony, and spending some time in Berlin. The result was a series of reports to the minister, afterwards published as Rapport sur VÉtat de l ’ Instruction Publique dans quelques pays de V Allemagne et particulièrement en Prusse. (Compare also De VInstruction Publique en Hollande, 1837.) IIis views were readily accepted on his return to France, and soon afterwards through his influence there was passed the law of primary instruction. (See his Expose des Motifs et Projet de Loi sur Γ Instruction Primaire, présentés à la Chambre des Députés, Séance du 2 Janvier 1833.)

In the words of a reviewer at the time (Edinburgh Review, July 1833), these documents “mark an epoch in the progress of national education, and are directly conducive to results important not only to France but to Europe.” The Report was translated by Mrs Austin in 1834. The translation was frequently reprinted in the United States of America. The legislatures of New Jersey and Massachusetts distributed it in the schools at the expense of the States. Cousin remarks that, among all the literary distinctions which he had received, “None has touched me more than the title of foreign member of the American Institute for Education.” To the enlightened views of the ministries of Guizot and Thiers under the citizen-king, and to the zeal, energy, and ability of Cousin in the work of organization, France owes what is best in her system of primary education,—a national interest which had...