M. Renan is thoroughly French.  The power of coming after the great synthetic products of the human spirit and distributing them by analysis into special categories, eminent in his country, is pre-eminent in him.  The facility at slipping over hard points, and at coming to unity of representation, partly by the solving force of an interior principle, and partly by ingenious accommodations, characteristic of French thought, characterizes his thinking in particular.  That supremacy of the critical spirit in the man which secures to it the loyalty of all the faculties is alike peculiar to France among nations, and to this writer among Frenchmen.  In Germany the imagination dominates, or at least contends with, the critical spirit; the French Ariel not only gives magic service to the critical Prospero, but seeks no emancipation, desires nothing better.  Hence an admirable clearness and shapeliness in the criticism of France.  Hence, also, in its best criticism a high degree of imaginative subtilty and penetration, without prejudice either to the dominion of common sense in the thought or to clearness in the statement.

M. Renan’s essay on “The Origin of Language” is typical of his quality.  Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,—­almost profound, and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our time,—­it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves with such ease, grace, and vigor, and in its style there is such crystal perspicuity and precision, that one must he proof against good thinking and excellent writing not to feel its charm.

The main propositions of the work—­whose force and significance, of course, cannot be felt in this dry enumeration—­are that language issues from the spontaneity of the human spirit,—­“spontaneity, which is both divine and human”; that its origin is simultaneous with the opening of consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel with consciousness, that is, with the developed spirit of man, in its nature and growth; and that, by consequence, its first form is not one of analytic simplicity, but of a high synthesis and a rich complexity.  The whole mind, he says, acts from the first, only not with the power of defining, distinguishing, separating, which characterizes the intellect of civilized man; his objects are groups; he grasps totalities; sees objects and their relationships as one fact; tends to connect his whole consciousness with all he sees, making the stone a man or a god:  and language, in virtue of its perpetual parallelism with consciousness, must be equally synthetic and complex from the start.

He finds himself opposed, therefore, first, to those, “like M. Bonald,” who attribute language to a purely extraneous, not an interior, revelation; secondly, to the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who made it a product of free and reflective reason; thirdly, to the German school, who trace it back to a few hundred monosyllabic roots, each expressing with analytic precision some definite material object, from which roots the whole subsequent must be derived by etymologic spinning-out, by agglutination, and by figurative heightening of meaning.