So for a time De Biran’s influence waned when that of Cousin himself faded. Maine de Biran stands quite in a different category from the Eclectics, as a unique figure at a transition period, the herald of the best that was to be in the thought of the century. Cousin and the Eclectic school, however, gained the official favour, and eclecticism was for many years the “official philosophy.”
This Eclectic School was due to the work of various thinkers, of whom we may cite Laromiguière (1756-1837), who marks the transition from Condillac, Royer-Collard (1763-1845), who, abandoning Condillac, turned for inspiration to the Scottish School (particularly to Reid), Victor Cousin (1792-1867), Jouffroy (1796-1842) and Paul Janet (1823-1899), the last of the notable eclectics. Of these “the chief” was Cousin. His personality dominated this whole school of thought, his _ipse dixit_ was the criterion of orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which we must note was supported by the powers of officialdom.
He rose from the Ecole Normale Supérieure to a professorship at the Sorbonne, which he held from the Restoration (1815 to 1830), with a break of a few years during which his course was suspended. These years he spent in Germany, to which country attention had been attracted by the work of Madame de Staël, _De l’Allemagne_ (1813). From 1830 to the beginning of our period (1851) Cousin, as director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as a _pair de France_ and a minister of state, organised and controlled the education of his country. He thus exercised a very great influence over an entire generation of Frenchmen, to whom he propounded the doctrines of his spiritualism.
His teaching was marked by a strong reaction against the doctrines of the previous century, which had given such value to the data of sense. Cousin abhorred the materialism involved in these doctrines, which he styled _une doctrine désolante_, and he endeavoured to raise the dignity and conception of man as a spiritual being. In the Preface to his Lectures of 1818, _Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien_ (Edition of 1853), published first in 1846, he lays stress upon the elements of his philosophy, which he presents as a true spiritualism, for it subordinates the sensory and sensual to the spiritual. He upholds the essentially spiritual nature of man, his liberty, moral responsibility and obligation, the dignity of human virtue, disinterestedness, charity, justice and beauty. These fruits of the spirit reveal, Cousin claimed, a God who is both the author and the ideal type of humanity, a Being who is not indifferent to the welfare and happiness of his creatures. There is a vein of romanticism about Cousin, and in him may be seen the same spirit which, on the literary side, was at work in Hugo, Lamartine and De Vigny.