ABSTRACT
In December 1815, in the first year both of the Restoration Monarchy and of his own teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Victor Cousin was lecturing on the history of philosophy. In post-Revolutionary France this was a field in great disarray, and Cousin harked back to the great schools of the Enlightenment, commending three of these in particular - the French, the Scottish, and the German traditions, which were represented respectively by Condillac, Reid, and Kant. French eclecticism developed within the Liberal, or Doctrinaire, movement of post-Napoleonic France. The growing criticism levelled at Cousin was that there was no philosophy behind his rhetoric and learning. The modern philosophy of eclecticism appeared in France in the early nineteenth century. According to George Henry Lewes, writing in 1857, 'Cousin's celebrated Eclecticism is nothing but a misconception of Hegel's History of Philosophy, fenced round with several plausible arguments', while Cousin himself was but 'a brilliant rhetorician utterly destitute of originality'.
