their short-sighted violence. After the revolt at Lyons in 1817 he was nominated procureur-général of the city, and by his sense and moderation did much to restore order and confidence. He was again a member of the chamber from 1819 to 1824, and vigorously opposed the exceptional legislation which the second administration of Richelieu passed under the influence of the ultra-Royalists. In 1824 he failed to secure re-election, and occupied himself with his judicial duties until his nomination as councillor of state in 1827. On the 8th of August 1829 he accepted the offer of the portfolio of justice in the Polignac ministry, but resigned on the 19th of May 1830, when he realized that the government intended to abrogate the Charter and the inevitable revolution that would follow. During the trial of the ex-ministers, in December, he was summoned as a witness, and paid a tribute to the character of his former colleagues which, under the circumstances, argued no little courage. He refused to take office under Louis Philippe, and retired into private life, dying on the 18th of September 1835.
COUSCOUS, or Kous-kous (an Arabic word derived from kaskasa, to pound), a dish common among the inhabitants of North Africa, made of flour rubbed together and steamed over a stew of mutton, fowl, &c., with which it is eaten.
COUSIN, JEAN (1500–1590), French painter, was born at Soucy, near Sens, and began as a glass-painter, his windows in the Sainte Chapelle at Vincennes being considered the finest in France. As a painter of subject pictures he is ranked as the founder of the French school, as having first departed from the practice of portraits. His “Last Judgment,” influenced by Parmigiano, is in the Louvre, and a “Descent from the Cross” (1523) in the museum at Mainz is attributed to him. He was known also as a sculptor, and an engraver, both in etching and on wood, his wood-cuts for Jean le Clerc’s Bible (1596) and other books being his best-known work. He also wrote a Livre de perspective (1560), and a Livre de portraiture (1571).
See Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Étude sur J. Cousin (1872), and Recueil des œuvres choisies de J. Cousin (1873).
COUSIN, VICTOR (1792–1867), French philosopher, the son
of a watchmaker, was born in Paris, in the Quartier St Antoine,
on the 28th of November 1792. At the age of ten he was sent
to the grammar school of the Quartier St Antoine, the Lycée
Charlemagne. Here he studied until he was eighteen. The
lycée had a connexion with the university, and when Cousin
left the secondary school he was “crowned” in the ancient hall
of the Sorbonne for the Latin oration delivered by him there,
in the general concourse of his school competitors. The classical
training of the lycée strongly disposed him to literature. He
was already known among his compeers for his knowledge of
Greek. From the lycée he passed to the Normal School of Paris,
where Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy. In
the second preface to the Fragmens philosophiques, in which
he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life,
Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory
of the day in 1811, when he heard Laromiguière for the first
time. “That day decided my whole life. Laromiguière taught
the philosophy of Locke and Condillac, happily modified on
some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance
at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual
bonhomie which penetrated and subdued.” Cousin was set
forthwith to lecture on philosophy, and he speedily obtained
the position of master of conferences (maître de conférences) in
the school. The second great philosophical impulse of his life
was the teaching of Royer-Collard. This teacher, as he tells
us, “by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his
words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from
the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since
become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented,
that of the Scottish philosophy.” In 1815–1816 Cousin attained
the position of suppléant (assistant) to Royer-Collard in the
history of modern philosophy chair of the faculty of letters.
There was still another thinker who influenced him at this early
period,—Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequalled
psychological observer of his time in France.
These men strongly influenced both the method and the matter of Cousin’s philosophical thought. To Laromiguière he attributes the lesson of decomposing thought, even though the reduction of it to sensation was inadequate. Royer-Collard taught him that even sensation is subject to certain internal laws and principles which it does not itself explain, which are superior to analysis and the natural patrimony of the mind. De Biran made a special study of the phenomena of the will. He taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the fact of voluntary activity, that activity in which our personality is truly revealed. It was through this “triple discipline,” as he calls it, that Cousin’s philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he entered on the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters.[1] He then took up the study of German, worked at Kant and Jacobi, and sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Schelling, by which he was at first greatly attracted. The influence of Schelling may be observed very markedly in the earlier form of his philosophy. He sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason. In 1817 he went to Germany, and met Hegel at Heidelberg. In this year appeared Hegel’s Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, of which Cousin had one of the earliest copies. He thought Hegel not particularly amiable, but the two became friends. The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.
The political troubles of France interfered for a time with his career. In the events of 1814–1815 he took the royalist side. He at first adopted the views of the party known as doctrinaire, of which Royer-Collard was the philosophical chief. He seems then to have gone farther Political troubles. than his party, and even to have approached the extreme Left. Then came a reaction against liberalism, and in 1821–1822 Cousin was deprived of his offices alike in the faculty of letters and in the Normal School. The Normal School itself was swept away, and Cousin shared at the hands of a narrow and illiberal government the fate of Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history. This enforced abandonment of public teaching was not wholly an evil. He set out for Germany with a view to further philosophical study. While at Berlin in 1824–1825 he was thrown into prison, either on some ill-defined political charge at the instance of the French police, or on account of certain incautious expressions which he had let fall in conversation. Liberated after six months, he continued under the suspicion of the French government for three years. It was during this period, however, that he thought out and developed what is distinctive in his philosophical doctrine. His eclecticism, his ontology and his philosophy of history were declared in principle and in most of their salient details in the Fragmens philosophiques (Paris, 1826). The preface to the Fragmens philosophiques. second edition (1833) and the Avertissement to the third (1838) aimed at a vindication of his principles against contemporary criticism. Even the best of his later books, the Philosophie écossaise (4th ed., 1863), the Du vrai, du beau, et du bien (12th ed., 1872; Eng. trans., 3rd ed., Edinburgh, 1854), and the Philosophie de Locke (4th ed., 1861) were simply matured revisions of his lectures during the period from 1815 to 1820. The lectures on Locke were first sketched in 1819, and fully developed in the course of 1829.
During the seven years of enforced abandonment of teaching he produced, besides the Fragmens, the edition of the works of Proclus (6 vols., 1820–1827), and the works of Descartes (11 vols., 1826). He also commenced his Translation of Plato (13 vols.), which occupied his leisure time from 1825 to 1840.
We see in the Fragmens very distinctly the fusion of the different philosophical influences by which his opinions were finally matured. For Cousin was as eclectic in thought and habit of mind as he was in philosophical principle and system. It is
- ↑ Fragmens philosophiques—préface deuxième.
