ABSTRACT
The main attraction of Maine de Biran, for Taine, lay in his juxtaposition of psychology and metaphysics. Though starting out from different positions, Maine de Biran and Reid were both seeking a satisfactory explanation for the undeniable sense of selfness, which neither the empirical nor the sceptical schools of philosophy, they felt, had been able to offer. Both turned to psychology in an attempt to understand the 'réminiscences vagues et sourdes' and the jugements primitifs' which, they sensed, constituted the reality of the self. Maine de Biran's psychology differed from the mathematically expressed, empirical psychology of the Idéologues, advocating a more subtle approach, which would examine the quality rather than the quantity of the components of the self. Following the fatal tendency of science to build from a simple basis up to an explanation for everything, psychology assumed that, because logically the simple precedes the complex, this must also be the case in nature.
