In 1785 De Biran, having completed his education, entered the Gardes du Corps, and was thereby thrown into a society for which he was extremely unfitted, although he appears at first to have given himself to it with abandon, and was ever after influenced by it, against his better mind, to a degree which must appear very strange to persons who have no sympathy with the workings of a highly nervous temperament. His personal and intellectual qualities were such as to give him at once a high place in a society which, though "aimable et frivole," knew how to recognise superiority. But where he might have led and commanded, he felt himself compelled to follow and obey; for his nature was one of those which renders every personality oppressively influential, and which extreme sympathy makes cowardly, unless it is upon great occasions,-when men like De Biran are. capable of a high and equable heroism, very surprising to such as have beheld them in common times quail at a cold look. This disposition caused him to court assiduously the good opinion of all with whom he came in contact, and, though himself singularly unworldly at heart, to cultivate the manners of the world with a success which rendered him a type of "cette politesse exquise, cette parfaite urbanité, qui distinguèrent la société française dans les temps qui ne sont plus."

The year '89 put an end to this society, though not to the habits which De Biran had contracted in it. The occupation of the Gardes du Corps was gone for the present, and having received a wound in his arm from a musket-ball during the early days of the Revolution, he retired to Grateloup, the family domain, into possession of which he had come by the death of his parents. Here he trusted to be forgotten by the Revolution, which he hated with a thoroughly appreciative political discernment. Perigord, the province in which his estate lay, was comparatively quiet, and De Biran was as yet too insignificant an enemy for the Revolution to go out of its way to seek him. His Christianity at this period, writes M. de Naville, who appears to be an orthodox and intelligent Catholic, seems to have limited itself to the maxim, that a religion was necessary for the people. And here we must pause to remark a quality, without a knowledge of which the reader would ill comprehend the character of our philosopher and his Pensées. From beginning to end of his career he does not show a sign of scepticism. The religious instruction of his early youth, and of his academical course at Perigueux, seems never to have been either rejected or accepted by him; it is clear that it did not interest him, and it seems to have taken a quiet place in the background of his mind, among other matters which did not concern him one way or the other. The fact that this is exactly what happens with

perhaps nine people out of ten does not diminish our surprise that it should have been so with De Biran. So it was, however. Nothing interested him, even to the extent of exciting his curiosity, which was not the subject of immediate perception as a reality, either to the senses, the intellect, or the spirit. "In order to comprehend," says M. de Naville, "the philosophic career of M. de Biran, we must never forget that he was not led to philosophy by the desire of knowing the secrets of the universe, nor even by that of acquiring the science of man in the abstract, but by that of knowing himself;" including, of course, his relations corporeal and spiritual to things beneath, about, and above him. Under what conditions is happiness to be obtained? was the practical question he proposed to himself in all his thoughts; and the first reply he received was, that they were primarily the equilibrium of the senses and the peace of the passions. His biographer well observes, that De Biran's views at this period of his life are nowhere more clearly indicated than in a passage in which he recommends purity of conscience and the practice of beneficence as contributing to "cet état physique dans lequel il fait consister le bonheur." The ideal of life which he incessantly pursued was by no means mere exemption from the derangements of the nervous system, and, at this time, it was quite as far from consisting in the pleasures in which a portion of his youth had been passed; it was, as we have seen, a perpetuation of that transient mood of joy, of which the loveliness of external nature, contemplated in moments of unusual health and sensibility, seems more often than any thing else to have been the proximate cause. The mood, when it came, was so high and pure, and really involved a spiritual element so much loftier than De Biran was intellectually conscious of, that, after all, there was no moral absurdity in his recommendation of a conscientious and beneficent life, on the ground of their being the means of more frequently securing this "état physique," as he called it. We must remember, as M. de Naville says, that "at this time the philosophy of Condillac reigned supreme, and that its partisans did not hesitate to consider it as the last word of human thought. Man was an animated statue, which received from without, and by the channels of the physical senses, all the elements of his life, intellectual or moral. The human spirit was a vase in which knowledge deposits itself, without any properly human principle of activity; all real science is included in the results of sensible observation; all else is a phantom of the imagination. So much for the intelligence of man. As for his will, it is little more than a mechanical agent, seeking pleasure, and flying from pain; good and evil are but modes of pleasure and pain. De Biran's way of resolving

the problem of happiness at this period was in harmony with this theory."

The political life of Maine de Biran may be said to have commenced with his appointment of Administrator of the Department of Dordogne, in 1795. It appears that during the year and a half he occupied the above position he acted with vigour against the tendencies of the Revolution, and showed himself capable, though not desirous, of higher political position. In 1798 he retired into private life, taking a wife back with him to enliven the solitude of Grateloup. He now gave himself seriously to metaphysical studies, and produced a succession of memoirs, upon subjects proposed by various learned societes in France and elsewhere, which were couronnés, and otherwise met with distinguished success.

In 1803 his wife died, leaving him with three children; and M. de Naville, who has no doubt had access to information fuller than that contained in the Diaries, writes that the "memory of his lost happiness settled in that region of the soul which is beyond the reach of indifference or forgetfulness.' There is an entire gap in his Journal of several years, including the years of his married life and some years after his wife's death; a fact from which we may perhaps infer that the comfort of her society and his grief for her loss filled, during this period, the place of the self-introspections with which he occupied the years before and after. Eleven years after her loss he writes, "Hier fut le jour anniversaire de la mort de Louise Fournier, ma bien-aimée femme. Ce jour me sera triste et sacrée toute ma vie. Semper amarum, semper luctuosum habebo."

During this long period a great change was operated in the metaphysical views of De Biran. It is to be regretted that no diary exists to show the steps of this change, which, when the journal is resumed in 1811, seems to have been well-nigh completed. In 1816 he writes:

"The art of living would consist in incessantly weakening the empire and influence of spontaneous impressions, and in placing our happiness in the exercise of those faculties which depend upon ourselves, or in the results of this exercise. The will should preside over all that we are."

How far the experience of a happiness which was clearly higher than the region of the senses, and the necessity of supporting the privation of it by efforts of the will, may have assisted this change, we can only guess. The influences of this experience and this necessity must surely have been great; and it is a fault in the biographical sketch of M. de Naville that they are not

taken into account. Men of diseased activity of mind, in combination with a degree of sensitiveness and moral timidity which renders society of some sort a need, and mixed society a torture, are likely to become extraordinarily attached to the women who have known and forgiven all their faults, and have supplied an external object in which refuge and repose have first been found.

M. de Naville calls attention to the fact that De Biran was always a solitary thinker. "He wanted the movement of a scientific centre, which enlarged the horizon of thought, and frequent and serious discussion, which gives clearness and firmness to expression." Hence M. Cousin objects to the views of the philosopher of Grateloup that they are narrow though profound. This may be a demerit in a metaphysical theory, but it greatly increases the personally interesting character of the Pensées. De Biran was solitary, not only from want of philosophical society, but still more from the absence or neglect of books, which is apparent from the great frequency of quotation from Fenelon and Pascal, and the rarity of allusion to any other writers. No book seems to have interested himself unless it bore the mark of being in great part the spiritual experience of the author. '

In 1809 De Biran was elected to serve in the "Corps Législatif," and for some time he seems to have taken an active and highly intelligent part in politics. At the end of 1813, Napoleon, after a series of reverses as vast as his former successes, was engaged in levying a new army of 300,000 men, and called upon the State to aid him. "The Legislative Corps seized this opportunity of making known to the vanquished general truths too long concealed from the victorious emperor. Maine de Biran sat with MM. Lainé, Raynouard, Gallois, and Flaugergues, in the famous commission which required that, before war was declared, the Assembly should be heard concerning the complaints and wishes of the people, and that effective guarantees should be given for the future peace of Europe and the liberty of French citizens." "The consequences of a new triumph of Napoleon seemed to De Biran much more to be dreaded than the temporary humiliation of defeat." In February 1814, he writes: "People fear to be pillaged, ruined, devastated by the Cossack, without thinking of the first cause of all their evils. They offer prayers for the success of the tyrant; they combine with him to repel foreign enemies; but forget that the most dangerous enemy will remain." The dissolution of the Legislative Corps restored De Biran for a time to solitude. On the restoration, the firm Royalist returned to Paris, reassuined the uniform of Garde du Corps, and was immediately called to the

Chamber of Deputies. He supported his party with courage and consistency at the trying moment of Napoleon's return. "During the hundred days no thought of weakness assailed him; so that, notwithstanding the extreme severity of his self-judgment, he was able to write, in recapitulating his impressions and actions at this epoch, J'ai été assez content de moi.' We regret that M. de Naville has not given us fuller notices of his political life, which seems to have been distinguished by the same simplicity, profundity, and intense apprehension of reality, which characterise his philosophy. The news of the battle of Waterloo was welcomed by him in his renewed seclusion at Grateloup, where he divided his time between his metaphysical researches, and lamentations so passionate and bitter over the condition and prospects of his country, that they had to be expressed mainly in exclamatory citations from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Job. His fears of the success of the Republican party, which he hated as he did that of the ruined despot, were not for the time fulfilled; and on the 20th of July he returned to Paris, and to an office about the person of the king. From this time until his death, with the exception of one session, he sat in the Chamber of Deputies, and appears to have done the utmost he could, with his very limited powers of oratory, to strengthen the hands of legitimate monarchy. The spirit in which he habitually undertook his legislative duties appears from a note in his pocket-book of 1815: "I am about to take part in an assembly which has to deal with the fate of France. What part am I called upon to play? I will put aside all vanity, all personal sentiment; I will be of perfect good faith. What matters it how people think of me, if I fulfil the duty for which I am sent?"

De Biran was, however, and felt himself to be, utterly unfitted for political life; he was wretched and constantly liable to the disturbance of his nervous and mental equilibrium in all society but that of his family at Grateloup. His natural part in life, as he well knew, was the passive part of an observer; and it would have been for his own good and that of the world had he acted according to his knowledge. We remember no other Frenchman so capable of perceiving and expressing the peculiar social truths which France stood in need of. "In his social as in his metaphysical theories, the worth of human personality is his point of departure. Had his life been prolonged, none would have been better able to combat, in the name of true science and of real observation of facts, those modern theories which sacrifice the citizen to the State, man to humanity; socialism, under every form, would have found its most ardent adversary, for the principles of socialism involve the negation of the dignity and rights of personal liberty. In the eyes of