reat note is the absolute. Again, 'two
principal operations make up the work of the human intelligence:
placed in face of things, it receives the impression of them more or
less exactly, completely, and profoundly; next, leaving the things,
it decomposes its impression, and classifies, distributes, and
expresses more or less skilfully the ideas that it draws from that
impression. In the second of these processes the classic is
superior.' Classicism is only the organ of a certain reason, the
_raison raisonnante_; that which insists upon thinking with as
little preparation and as much ease as possible; which is contented
with what it has acquired, and takes no thought about augmenting or
renewing it; which either cannot or will not embrace the plenitude
and the complexity of things as they are.

As an analysis of the classic spirit in French literature, nothing
can be more ingenious and happy than these pages (p. 241, etc.) But,
after all, classic is only the literary form preferred by a certain
turn of intelligence; and we shall do well to call that turn of
intelligence by a general name, that shall comprehend not only its
literary form but its operations in every other field. And
accordingly at the end of this very chapter we find M. Taine driven
straightway to change classic for mathematic in describing the
method of the new learning. And the latter description is much
better, for it goes beneath the surface of literary expression,
important as that is, down to the methods of reasoning. It leads us
to the root of the matter, to the deductive habits of the French
thinkers. The mischief of the later speculation of the eighteenth
century in France was that men argued about the complex,
conditional, and relative propositions of society, as if they had
been theorems and problems of Euclid. And M. Taine himself is, as we
say, compelled to change his term when he comes to the actual facts
and personages of the revolutionary epoch. It was the geometric,
rather than the classic, quality of political reasoning, which
introduced so much that we now know to have been untrue and
mischievous.

Even in literary history it is surely nearer the truth to say of the
latter half of the century that the revolutionary movement began
with the break-up of classic form and the gradual dissolution of the
classic spirit. Indeed this is such a commonplace of criticism, that
we can only treat M. Taine's inversion of it as a not very happy
para