MAINE DE BIRAN

MAINE DE BIRAN, FRANÇOIS-PIERRE-GONTHIER, a

distinguished philosopher of France, the son of a physician, was born at Bergerac on the 29th November 1766. After studying with distinction under the doctrinaires of Perigueux, he entered the Life-Guards of Louis XVI., and was present at Versailles on the notable 5th and 6th of October 1789. On the breaking up of the garde du corps, Maine de Biran retired to his patrimonial inheritance of Gratecloup, near Bergerac, where his sequestered residence and limited income preserved him from the horrors of the Revolution. It was at this period that, as he says himself, he "passed per saltum from frivolity to philosophy." The forced leisure of this fearful time decided the vocation of his life. He combined, in a more than ordinary degree, subtle sensitiveness to external influences with singular acuteness in surveying and analyzing internal phenomena. The modes of the mind and their organic causes or conditions were alike submitted to his scrutiny. He began his philosophical studies with psychology, and he made psychology the study of his life. When the Reign of Terror was succeeded by calmer days, Maine de Biran was called to take part in the administrative and political affairs of his country. After his exclusion from the Council of the Five Hundred, on being suspected of royalism, he took part with his friend Lainé in the commission of 1813, which gave expression for the first time to direct opposition to the will of the emperor. Under the Restoration, Maine de Biran held the office of treasurer to the Chamber of Deputies, and habitually retired during the autumn recess to his native district to pursue his favourite study. He died 16th July 1824.

Maine de Biran ranks among the earliest of the rational psychologists of France, who, in the beginning of the present century, raised a protest against the exclusive sensationalism of the school of Condillac. Maine de Biran was originally a disciple of Cabanis and De Tracy, but afterwards abandoned their system to adopt an absolute spiritualism closely resembling that of Leibnitz. He rejected, however, the pre-established harmony of the German philosopher, and endeavoured to explain the phenomena which that celebrated theory was meant to rationalize, by resolving mind and matter into forces identical in their nature, but differing in the modes of their activity. All objects, external and internal, are recognised by consciousness only as forces, more or less active, more or less passive. To explain the phenomena of external perception on those principles, is accordingly an easy matter with Maine de Biran. You can dispense with the mediate object of the representation; you have no need of the hypothesis of occasional causes or of pre-established harmony; you are saved the humiliation of taking refuge in your ignorance, and bowing down before a mystery; your dead matter and living mind are not two distinct substances,—the relations of body and soul are only relations of forces of action and reaction. The theory of causation of Maine de Biran is the portion of his philosophy which is most generally known in this country; and Sir W. Hamilton, in commenting on it, terms its author "one of the acutest metaphysicians of France." The casual judgment is regarded by Maine de Biran as an original à posteriori cognition, given through a self-consciousness of the efficiency of our own volitions. M. Cousin, who is constant in his laudation of the originality of his countryman, characterizes him as "the greatest metaphysician of France since Malebranche." A complete edition of the Œuvres Philosophiques de Maine de Biran was published by M. V. Cousin, 4 vols. 8vo, Paris, 1841.