Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893)

"But of all the vivid terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a man who never saw him and whose book was not directly dealing with him. I mean Taine's account of him, in the first volume of "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine." You can never forget it when once you have read it. He produces his effect in a wonderful, and to me a novel, way. He does not, for example, say in mere crude words that Napoleon had a more than mediaeval Italian cunning. He presents a succession of show more documents — gives a series of contemporary instances to prove it. Then, having got that fixed in your head by blow after blow, he passes on to another phase of his character" --Through the Magic Door, pg. 197 show less

The foundation text for scientific psychology in France. In Boring 1929. Tain influenced Binet. Taine had achieved fame over a wide range of disciplines�as a leading French thinker, as a literary and art critic, and as a historian. His greatest influence upon his contemporaries, however, was as an intellectual leader, one of the most esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism, the cult of science in its most devoted, high-minded, and rational form. His work represents a reaction show more against excessive emotionalism and spiritualist philosophy and was unified by his attempt to apply the scientific method to the study of literature and art, psychology, and cultural history and to ethics and metaphysics. show less

$300. 4 volume set. Literature, first edition

complete sub-set - The Colonial Pres