with the publication of the Fragmens of 1826 that the first great widening of his reputation is associated. In 1827 followed the Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie.
In 1828 M. de Vatimesnil, minister of public instruction in
Martignac’s ministry, recalled Cousin and Guizot to their
professorial positions in the university. The three
years which followed were the period of Cousin’s
greatest triumph as a lecturer. His return to the
Career as
a lecturer.
chair was the symbol of the triumph of constitutional ideas and
was greeted with enthusiasm. The hall of the Sorbonne was
crowded as the hall of no philosophical teacher in Paris had been
since the days of Abelard. The lecturer had a singular power
of identifying himself for the time with the system which he
expounded and the historical character he portrayed. Clear
and comprehensive in the grasp of the general outlines of his
subject, he was methodical and vivid in the representation of
details. In exposition he had the rare art of unfolding and
aggrandizing. There was a rich, deep-toned, resonant eloquence
mingled with the speculative exposition; his style of expression
was clear, elegant and forcible, abounding in happy turns and
striking antitheses. To this was joined a singular power of
rhetorical climax. His philosophy exhibited in a striking
manner the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and
its logical need of grouping details round central principles.
There was withal a moral elevation in his spiritual philosophy which came home to the hearts of his hearers, and seemed to afford a ground for higher development in national literature and art, and even in politics, than the traditional philosophy of France had appeared capable of yielding. His lectures produced more ardent disciples, imbued at least with his spirit, than those of any other professor of philosophy in France during the 18th century. Tested by the power and effect of his teaching influence, Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi, Schelling and Dugald Stewart have united the gifts of speculative, expository and imaginative power. Tested even by the strength of the reaction which his writings have in some cases occasioned, his influence is hardly less remarkable. The taste for philosophy—especially its history—was revived in France to an extent unknown since the 17th century.
Among the men who were influenced by Cousin we may note T. S. Jouffroy, J. P. Damiron, Garnier, J. Barthélemy St Hilaire, F. Ravaisson-Mollien, Rémusat, Jules Simon and A. Franck. Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow-students and then disciples. Jouffroy, however, Disciples and followers. always kept firm to the early—the French and Scottish—impulses of Cousin’s teaching. Cousin continued to lecture regularly for two years and a half after his return to the chair. Sympathizing with the revolution of July, he was at once recognized by the new government as a friend of national liberty. Writing in June 1833 he explains both his philosophical and his political position:—
“I had the advantage of holding united against me for many years both the sensational and the theological school. In 1830 both schools descended into the arena of politics. The sensational school quite naturally produced the demagogic party, and the theological school became quite as naturally absolutism, safe to borrow from time to time the mask of the demagogue in order the better to reach its ends, as in philosophy it is by scepticism that it undertakes to restore theocracy. On the other hand, he who combated any exclusive principle in science was bound to reject also any exclusive principle in the state, and to defend representative government.”
The government was not slow to do him honour. He was induced by the ministry of which his friend Guizot was the head to become a member of the council of public instruction and counsellor of state, and in 1832 he was made a peer of France. He ceased to lecture, but retained the title of professor of philosophy. Finally, he accepted the position of minister of public instruction in 1840 under Thiers. He was besides director of the Normal School and virtual head of the university, and from 1840 a member of the Institute (Academy of the Moral and Political Sciences). His character and his official position at this period gave him great power in the university and in the educational arrangements of the country. In fact, during the seventeen and a half years of the reign of Louis Philippe, Cousin mainly moulded the philosophical and even the literary tendencies of the cultivated class in France.
But the most important work he accomplished during this
period was the organization of primary instruction. It was to the
efforts of Cousin that France owed her advance, in
primary education, between 1830 and 1848. Prussia
and Saxony had set the national example, and France
Relation to primary education
in France.
was guided into it by Cousin. Forgetful of national
calamity and of personal wrong, he looked to Prussia as affording
the best example of an organized system of national education;
and he was persuaded that “to carry back the education of
Prussia into France afforded a nobler (if a bloodless) triumph
than the trophies of Austerlitz and Jena.” In the summer of
1831, commissioned by the government, he visited Frankfort and
Saxony, and spent some time in Berlin. The result was a series
of reports to the minister, afterwards published as Rapport sur
l’état de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne
et particulièrement en Prusse. (Compare also De l’instruction
publique en Hollande, 1837.) His views were readily accepted on
his return to France, and soon afterwards through his influence
there was passed the law of primary instruction. (See his
Exposé des motifs et projet de loi sur l’instruction primaire,
présentés à la chambre des députés, séance du 2 janvier 1833.)
In the words of the Edinburgh Review (July 1833), these documents “mark an epoch in the progress of national education, and are directly conducive to results important not only to France but to Europe.” The Report was translated into English by Mrs Sarah Austin in 1834. The translation was frequently reprinted in the United States of America. The legislatures of New Jersey and Massachusetts distributed it in the schools at the expense of the states. Cousin remarks that, among all the literary distinctions which he had received, “None has touched me more than the title of foreign member of the American Institute for Education.” To the enlightened views of the ministries of Guizot and Thiers under the citizen-king, and to the zeal and ability of Cousin in the work of organization, France owes what is best in her system of primary education,—a national interest which had been neglected under the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration (see Exposé, p. 17). In the first two years of the reign of Louis Philippe more was done for the education of the people than had been either sought or accomplished in all the history of France. In defence of university studies he stood manfully forth in the chamber of peers in 1844, against the clerical party on the one hand and the levelling or Philistine party on the other. His speeches on this occasion were published in a tractate Défense de l’université et de la philosophie (1844 and 1845).
This period of official life from 1830 to 1848 was spent, so far as philosophical study was concerned, in revising his former lectures and writings, in maturing them for publication or reissue, and in research into certain periods of the history of philosophy. In 1835 appeared De la Philosophical writings. Métaphysique d’Aristote, suivi d’un essai de traduction des deux premiers livres; in 1836, Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l’année 1818, and Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard. This Cours de philosophie appeared later in 1854 as Du vrai, du beau, et du bien. From 1825 to 1840 appeared Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie, in 1829 Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie de Tennemann, translated from the German. In 1840–1841 we have Cours d’histoire de la philosophie morale au XVIII e siècle (5 vols.). In 1841 appeared his edition of the Œuvres philosophiques de Maine-de-Biran; in 1842, Leçons de philosophie sur Kant (Eng. trans. A. G. Henderson, 1854), and in the same year Des Pensées de Pascal. The Nouveaux fragments were gathered together and republished in 1847. Later, in 1859, appeared Petri Abaelardi Opera.
During this period Cousin seems to have turned with fresh interest to those literary studies which he had abandoned for speculation under the influence of Laromiguière and Royer-Collard. To this renewed interest we owe his studies of men
