On Intelligence (Taine book)

On Intelligence (French: De l’Intelligence; 1870) is a major work in the discipline of psychology written by French polymath Hippolyte Taine, in which the author expounded his theory of mind. The first edition was published in two volumes and was translated into English in 1871 by T. D. Haye.

Thesis

Taine opposes the speculative and introspective approach of the eclectics and outlines a scientific methodology for the study of human personality that established him, alongside contemporaries such as Théodule-Armand Ribot and Pierre Janet, as a founder of empirical psychology. Writing from a positivistic stance and drawing on evidence from psychopathology and neural physiology, Taine mounted an influential attack on the tendency toward reification of abstractions inherent in academic psychology of the time.

For Taine, terms such as self, memory, and reason suggest by their simplicity the existence of indivisible mental entities and thus prevent us from grasping the enormous complexities of the underlying psychological mechanisms.

De l’Intelligence helped to modify methods of research by its emphasis on experiment, the search for causes, the study of pathological cases, and the physiological basis of personality.

Hans Aarsleff asserted that Ferdinand de Saussure derived his basic linguistic notions from De l’Intelligence.

Modern editions

• On Intelligence (1977; with preface by Daniel N. Robinson)
• De l'Intelligence (2005; with introduction by Serge Nicolas)

External links

• On Intelligence at Hathi Trust