his Essay on the Foundations of Psychology. Neither sensation nor thought,
but will, the internal sensation of bodily effort, is the primary experience; “I
will, therefore I am,” is the starting point of all knowledge. It is willed attention
and movement which makes external sensations vivid; outward impressions
fall prey to Hume’s critique insofar as they reveal no necessary connections,
but the inner experience of the will gives immediate certainty of causality.
Maine’s philosophy is a manifesto against associationism and mechanism; at
the same time, it avoids the sentimentalism and emotionalism of Chateaubri-
and and the religious conservatives. Maine de Biran enjoyed a reputation
among his contemporaries as the master philosopher, and his will-psychology,
along with Royer-Collard’s religious defense, briefly became the official doc-
trine of the university, before Cousin’s scholastic eclecticism set in (CMH,
1902–1911: 9.133). After the Restoration, Maine worked inconclusively on
his system until his death in 1824. The opening in which religious and disci-
plinary innovations seemed possible in the aftermath of the Revolution had
shut down again as official religion reasserted control over education. Maine-
like ideas remained in the air in non-academic literary circles. In the liberali-
zation of the 1830s, Balzac’s Peau de Chagrin describes ambitious young men
during the episode of relatively uncensored Parisian journalism striving to
make their fortunes by writing the definitive treatise on the will. Maine’s
will-philosophy has the flavor of a new religion compounded from the ingre-
dients of modern science, which was something of a free-floating vogue in the
era of Balzac and Stendahl.
Maine’s work resonates with the founding of new scientific disciplines
which went along with the reorganization of French intellectual production at
the time of the suppression of the old university and the establishment of the
Institute and the École Polytechnique. Maine’s structural parallel is Comte,
whose lineage connects similarly with the scientific establishment (Comte was
a pupil at the Polytechnique, 1814–1816, suspended for political troubles, who
hung on as an examiner in mathematics), and with 1790s politicians (Comte
got his first ideas during 1817–1824 when serving as secretary to Saint-Simon,
promulgator of socialist doctrines). Comte came to attention in the 1830s as
classifier of the sciences and theorist of the sequence in which they appeared;
he was among the first to recognize biology as a distinct science, and he initially
attracted the support of mainstream research scientists, including Fourier.
Comte’s crowning science, sociology, superseded the Idéologues’ favorite, psy-
chology. Here too Comte was a territorial rival to Maine de Biran, all the more
so since Comte declared the era of metaphysics past, while Maine built the
psychology of the will into a metaphysics, claiming position as the core of
academic philosophy in place of Descartes’s cogito. Seemingly Maine should
have the reputation of a classic figure of the French philosophical tradition,
760 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths