Regime, the critic
accustomed to interpret civilizations, literature and works of art,
the thinker, in fine, who, to prepare himself for the greatest tasks he
undertook, traveled five times over France, studying its life with
the eyes of an artist, in the light of history and of psychology, ever
preceding his philosophic study with visual investigation, would have
been equal to the task.[5105]

Already for several years, M. Taine, aware that his time was short, had
narrowed the limits of the work he was engaged upon. But what his work
lost in breadth and in richness of detail it would have gained in
depth and in power. All his master ideas would have been found in it,
foreshortened and concentrated. Always seeking in this or that group of
them what he called his generators, intellectual and moral as well as
political, he would have described all those which explain the French
group. Unfortunately, here again the elements are wanting which allow
one to foreshadow what this final analysis and last construction might
have been. M. Taine did not write in anticipation. Long before taking
the pen in hand he had derived his most significant facts and formed
his plan. He carried them in his brain where they fell into order of
themselves. Ten lines of notes, a few memoranda of conversations--faint
reflections, to us around him, of the great inward light--are all that
enable one to attempt an indication of the few leading conceptions were
to complete "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine."

"Le Milieu Moderne", was to have been the title of the last book. The
question here is how to discover the great characteristics of the period
into which European societies entered and about were to live. Rising
to a higher point of view than that to which he had confined himself
in studying France, M. Taine regarded its metamorphosis as a case of
transformation as general as the passage of the Cite antique over to
the Roman Empire over to the feudal State. Now, as formerly, this
transformation is the effect of a "change in the intellectual and
physical condition of men"; that is to say, in other words, in the
environment that surrounds them. Such is the advent of a new geological
period, of a glacial period, for example, or, more precisely, "the very
slow and then accelerated upheaval of a continent, forcing the submarine
species which breathe by gills to transform themselves into species
which breathe by lungs." It is impossible to divi