ABSTRACT
By the end of his life, Taine's reputation as a radical and independent thinker, as a leading critic of art and literature and as forerunner in the new psychology, had given way to one as apostate, hypocrite and coward. Taine's sensibility coexisted, however, in a permanent dialectic with the rational bent of his intellect, which was responsible for the attraction to him of inductive reasoning, critical analysis and scientific research, and for the dogmatic tone in which he expressed them. Taine would have been the first to classify the unconscious irony which affected his own character and his definition of the self as another 'produit moral', like the vice and virtue of the introduction to his history of English literature. The inconclusiveness, evasiveness even, of Taine's writing shows striking similarities with the presentation of fellow intellectuals at the time, and with a mentality which developed in Second Empire France.
