Modern French Philosophy

Taine and Renan both express the initial attitude, a firm belief in determinism, but it is most clear and rigid in the work of Taine. His whole philosophy is hostile to any belief in freedom. The strictly positivist, empiricist and naturalist tone of his thought combined with the powerful influence of Spinoza’s system to produce in him a firm belief in necessity–a necessity which, as we have seen, was severely rational and of the type seen in mathematics and in logic.