THE BROAD PICTURE

Hippolyte Taine relates the following story: on an autumn morning in 1811, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, newly appointed professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, is strolling along the banks of the Seine, thinking over the content of his teaching. He is dissatisfied with the philosophy of Condillac and his followers, the Idéologues, which seems to him too sceptical and materialistic. He happens to pass a bookshop where a title catches his eye: Recherches sur l'entendement humain d'après les principes du sens commun, par le docteur Thomas Reid (the first translation, published in 1768, of Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense). He opens the book, reads a few pages and his mind is filled with light. Taine concludes: 'He had just bought and founded the new French philosophy.' Among Royer-Collard's first students was Victor Cousin, , dedicatee of Sir William Hamilton’s The Works of Thomas Reid.

This anecdote might be too nice to be true – in fact, Thomas Reid was already known to the French – but we can draw a lesson from it. When we study the impact or influence of one nation upon another, of one philosophical tradition upon another, we cannot ignore the various accidents and circumstances which intervene in the causal connections of a sequence of events. We have to consider the role played by translations (and the ability of the translator), the reception given by philosophical or literary journals, the import of the message in such and such intellectual contexts, the position of people, the pliability of doctrines, the ability of a philosopher to assimilate a new idea or a new way of ideas, and so on.