Paris Monument to Hippolyte Taine

There is a long history of discussions of mediumship as related to dissociation and the unconscious mind during the Nineteenth Century. After an overview of relevant ideas and observations from the mesmeric, hypnosis, and spiritualistic literatures, I focus on the writings of Jules Baillarger, Alfred Binet, Paul Blocq, Théodore Flournoy, Jules Héricourt, William James, Pierre Janet, Ambroise August Liébeault, Frederic W.H. Myers, Julian Ochorowicz, Charles Richet, Hippolyte Taine, Paul Tascher, and Edouard von Hartmann. While some of their ideas reduced mediumship solely to intra-psychic processes, others considered as well veridical phenomena. The speculations of these individuals, involving personation, and different memory states, were part of a general interest in the unconscious mind, and in automatisms, hysteria, and hypnosis during the period in question. Similar ideas continued into the Twentieth Century.

Download Full-text

Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893)

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism ◽

10.1017/cho9781139018456.027 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 393-405

Author(s):

Hilary S. Nias

Keyword(s):

Hippolyte Taine

Download Full-text

Hippolyte Taine (1828 – 1893)

Klassiker der Soziologie der Künste ◽

10.1007/978-3-658-01455-1_3 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 45-72

Author(s):

Jonathan Kropf

Keyword(s):

Hippolyte Taine

Download Full-text

Review. Hippolyte Taine. Weinstein, Leo

French Studies ◽

10.1093/fs/32.2.204-a ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 32 (2) ◽

pp. 204-205

Author(s):

D. G. CHARLTON

Keyword(s):

Hippolyte Taine

Download Full-text

Pictet’s Du Beau (1856) and the crystallisation of saussurean linguistics

Historiographia Linguistica ◽

10.1075/hl.30.3.05jos ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 30 (3) ◽

pp. 365-388 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

John E. Joseph

Keyword(s):

Intellectual Life ◽

Independent Evidence ◽

Missing Link ◽

Language System ◽

Ferdinand De Saussure ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Linguistic Sign ◽

Hippolyte Taine

Summary The key formative figure in the intellectual life of the young Ferdinand de Saussure was Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875), a family friend best remembered for his Les origines indo-européennes, ou Les Aryas primitifs: Essai de paléontologie linguistique (1859–1863). A review of its second edition written by Saussure two years after Pictet’s death contains a wealth of information about his life and work, including a description of his book Du beau, dans la nature, l’art et la poésie: Etudes esthétiques (1856). In it, Pictet makes clear that aesthetics is principally centred on the problem of the meaning of the word beauty, and that within this problem are to be found all the tensions between the rational and sensible, the intellectual and emotional, the subjective and objective, and intention and reaction, that are at the heart of the whole Enlightenment discourse on the nature of language. A number of remarks on regularity of form in nature, for example in crystallisation, find echoes in Saussure’s later characterisation of the language system, as do Pictet’s assertions about the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign and about the signified being not a thing but a concept. Indeed, a number of ‘influences’ on Saussure which Aarsleff (1982) credited to Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) – for whom we have no independent evidence of such influence – can more convincingly be ascribed to his early mentor Pictet. Du beau moreover provides a ‘missing link’ between the Enlightenment philosophers whose aesthetic views it details, and the traces of their philosophical positions that have repeatedly been detected in the Cours de linguistique générale.

Download Full-text