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Towards a New Anthropology of the Embodied Mind
Studies in Mysticism, Idealism,
and Phenomenology

Edited by

Andrés Quero-Sanchez (Universitä t Regensburg)

Ben Morgan (University of Oxford)

volume 4

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smip

 Towards a New Anthropology of
the Embodied Mind
Maine de Biran’s Physio-Spiritualism from 1800 to the
21st Century

Edited by

Manfred Milz

leiden | boston
Cover illustration: Jean-Bernard Duvivier, Portrait of François-Pierre-Gonthier de Biran, 1798 (An vi),
drawing on paper (?), 1914 in Saint-Sauveur, Château de Grateloup, location unknown.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039200

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface.

issn 2542-4963
isbn 978-90-04-51561-1 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-68377-8 (e-book)
doi 10.1163/9789004683778

Copyright 2023 by Manfred Milz. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis,
Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress.
Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for
re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

 In memory of
Klaus Herding,
German Art Historian
(1939–2018)

∵
Contents

Acknowledgements x
List of Figures xiii
Notes on Contributors xiv

Introduction 1

part 1
Maine de Biran around 1800

1 Maine de Biran: Gender, Sensibility, and the Dynamics of Self in

Post-revolutionary France 53
Sean M. Quinlan

2 Maine de Biran and Neurology 69

Larry S. McGrath

3 On Sympathy and Attention: Maine de Biran, Reader of Adam Smith

and Dugald Stewart 85
Marco Piazza

4 Did Maine de Biran Refute David Hume? 99

Warren Schmaus

5 Biran and Schelling: “Contact Points” for a Radical Anthropology 112

Marc Maesschalck

6 Schopenhauer and the Primal Will—A Radically Phenomenological

Reading in Comparison with Maine de Biran 129
Rolf Kühn

7 Quel œil peut se voir soi-même? Character and Habit in Stendhal and
Maine de Biran 147
Alessandra Aloisi
viii contents

part 2
Intermediary Biranian Posterities (1870s–1945)

8 Jules Lachelier—Reader of Maine de Biran: Contention and

Legacy 165
Denise Vincenti

9 Maine de Biran, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, Henri Bergson: from

Concentration to Expansion and Back Again 180
Benjamin J. Bâcle

10 The French Kant (or Fichte)? Brunschvicg, Biran, and the missed
Synchronism 195
Pietro Terzi

11 Maurice Blondel’s Philosophical Debt to Maine de Biran 207

Michael A. Conway

12 Power(s) of Self: Louis Lavelle and Maine de Biran 222

Anne Devarieux

13 The First Significant Season of Maine de Biran’s Reception in Italy

between Neo-Kantianism and Spiritual Realism (1911–1939) 238
Marco Piazza

14 Maine de Biran in Huxley’s Brave New World: Transcending the

Utilitarian through a Spiritual Self 258
Manfred Milz

15 Voluntary Movement as Reflection or Creation: Maine de Biran, Félix

Ravaisson, and Nishida Kitarō 280
Mika Imono

part 3
Postwar Biran-Reception and Beyond: Existentialism;
Phenomenology and Poststructuralism (1943–2010)

16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur on the “Primitive Fact” of

Subjectivity in Maine de Biran 297
Eftichis Pirovolakis
contents ix

17 The Docile Body: Ricoeur’s Critique of Biran’s “Primitive Fact” 313

Scott Davidson

18 “L’Immanence: une vie …”—Gilles Deleuze, Maine de Biran, and the

Transcendental Field 325
Alessandra Aloisi

19 Sensing Resistance? On Derrida’s Reading of Maine de Biran 341

Björn Thorsteinsson

20 (An) Unforgettable Maine de Biran? The Biranian Heresy of Michel

Henry 356
Anne Devarieux

21 The Deep Layer of Affectivity—Maine de Biran’s Influence on Marc

Richir’s Phenomenological Project 370
Luís A. Umbelino

Bibliography 385
Index 422
Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments from previous volume

The editor of this volume expresses his gratitude to the editors of the journal
Laval Théologique et Philosophique, Bernard Collette and Guy Jobin, for giving
their consent to translate and reprint a shortened version of Anne Devarieux’s
article “Puissance(s) du moi: Louis Lavelle et Maine de Biran,” previously pub-
lished in volume 69/1 (2013), pp. 35–56.
Herausgegeben mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Universitätsstiftung
Lucia und Dr. Otfried-Eberz im Rahmen der Regensburger Universitätsstiftung
(Bayern), Deutschland.
Published with the kind support of the Lucia and Dr. Otfried-Eberz Univer-
sity Foundation within the framework of the Regensburg University Founda-
tion (Bavaria), Germany.

Acknowledgments from current volume

The core of this volume originated within and evolved around the first exten-
sive international multidisciplinary research colloquium devoted to the work
and influence of the French philosopher Marie-François-Pierre Maine de Biran
(1766–1824), Posterities of Maine de Biran’s Physio-Spiritualism in the 20th Cen-
tury. Organized by the Faculty of Languages, Literature and Cultures at Regens-
burg University, 25–26 September 2020, it was facilitated, due to the Corona
restrictions, in an online format.
The idea of reconstructing some of Biran’s core discourses and initial recep-
tion around 1800, moving then to trace his resonances throughout the course
of the twentieth century with a special focus on the period following World
War ii, however, emerged from a need for research regarding this specific tra-
jectory identified during the course of a research project devoted to proto-
phenomenological aesthetics that the editor of this volume is still in the pro-
cess of pursuing at the aforementioned institution in the context of visual arts.
Indeed, this book, constituting a joint effort by scholars from Belgium,
France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, the United
Kingdom, and the USA, is attending to a need to thoroughly examine the
scarcely investigated influence of Biran’s conspicuous concept of “physio-spir-
itualism” upon postmodernity, existentialism, and phenomenology, respec-
tively on experimental psychology, as well as physiology and neurology, during
acknowledgments xi

the second half of the twentieth century—against the historical backdrop of

multidisciplinary medical humanities, philosophy, and mysticism.
To this end, the editor has, in following his initial historiographic mapping
of the project for the purpose of a funding application, assembled a team of
researchers comprised, on the one hand, of explicit Biran-scholars and, on the
other, of scholars specializing in those philosophers whose concepts have been
explicitly influenced by Maine de Biran’s physio-spiritualism. This has enabled
senior and junior investigators from the disciplines of cultural history, philos-
ophy, psychology, and literature to hold a cross-fertilizing dialogue that is, in
fact, ongoing and that continues to evolve into further projects.
Our effervescent conversations and constructive disagreements during the
research symposium and in its wake have ultimately inspired a dynamic writing
process which enabled us to identify synergies and established a fluid coher-
ence between individual topics and amongst the historical phases wherein
these are situated. The ongoing dialogues within our heterogeneous research
circle and with scholars from neighboring disciplines have been and are laying
the foundations of the historical discourse that emerged from the concept of
physio-spiritualism—especially in its relationship to phenomenology.
While many of the chapters united and intertwined in this volume are based
on talks presented during the symposium, others were written later for this
project at the editor’s request by scholars who were either unable to join our
discussions or preferred to make their contribution exclusively in written form.
An exception is the chapter by Anne Devarieux “Power(s) of Self: Louis Lavelle
and Maine de Biran” that was previously published in French. I also wish to
thank the author, the editors, and the publishing house involved for granting
permission to translate this text.
The initial research conducted for this book would not have been possi-
ble without the inspiring creative academic environment provided, on a daily
basis, by all of my colleagues. In this regard, I would like to express my heartfelt
thankfulness, particularly to Christiane Heibach (Vice-Chair), Bernhard Dot-
zler (Chair), Renate Vogl (our Secretary) at the Institute of Information and
Media, Language, and Culture of the University of Regensburg—for their con-
tinued support of my research over the past years. I am equally grateful to our
assistants, especially to Sonja Kalnin and to Tobias Emmerling. Sonja Kalnin
has devoted much time and energy to this project both in her support with
the preliminary organizational steps of the colloquium and during its actual
execution. Her much valued dedication was instrumental in developing this
project expeditiously. Tobias Emmerling meticulously supported the prepara-
tion of the book manuscript in its final stage, to skilfully address format and
technical issues.
xii acknowledgments

The translations required for this book have been generously funded by the
Lucia and Dr. Otfried Eberz Foundation under the umbrella of the Bavarian
Vielberth University Foundation. The team of authors as a whole feels indebted
to the board of trustees for their flexibility during these challenging times of
the Corona pandemic, specifically in their decision to reallocate the financial
resources usually provided to facilitate conference venues for translating essen-
tial texts from French and German into English. In this context, I wish to express
appreciation for the efforts of Jacob Watson, the translator of the texts written
by Anne Devarieux and Rolf Kühn. Mr. Watson has also done language editing
for the chapters written by non-native speakers to conform to proper English
style as well as adapting all the chapters, in tandem with the editor, to adhere
to the required consistency.
Furthermore, the editor and authors wish to thank Ben Morgan (University
of Oxford) and Andrés Quero Sanchez (University of Regensburg) for their solid
trust expressed by inviting us, at a very early stage—six months prior to our
research colloquium—to publish the outcome of this project in their distin-
guished novel series Studies in Mysticism, Idealism and Phenomenology.
I also extend my heartfelt gratitude to Jennifer Pavelko (the former Senior
Acquisitions Editor of Philosophy at Brill) and to her successor Erika Man-
darino (Acquisitions Editor of Philosophy at Brill), as well as to her colleague
Helena Schöb (Associate Editor of Philosophy) for their continued interest,
support, and advice.
I am equally grateful to Denise Vincenti (University of Milan-Bicocca) and
Marc Maesschalck (Catholic University of Louvain), contributors to this vol-
ume, who have been supportive in granting remote access to the library hold-
ings of their academic institutions and provided, via email-communication,
data from resources that contributed to the precision of the manuscript.
I also wish to address a special note of gratitude to colleagues and friends: to
Sigmund Bonk (Director of the Academic Forum Albertus Magnus; Institute of
Philosophy, University of Regensburg), to Anne Devarieux (Department of Phi-
losophy, Université Caen Normandie) and to Rolf Kühn (Emeritus, University of
Freiburg im Breisgau) for their valuable critical input whenever we exchanged
thoughts regarding the evolving structure and content of this project.
Most important of all, I would like to thank the wonderful being by my
side, my wife Neslihan Demirtaş-Milz, who, even from a distance, constantly
enriches my endeavors and my life.
Figures

1 Stendhal’s drawing in “Le caractère et la géologie” (1822), Journal littéraire, iii,

del Litto (ed.), vol. 35 158
2 Stendhal’s drawing in “Le caractère et la géologie” (1822), Journal littéraire, iii,
del Litto (ed.), vol. 35 158
3 Edmé Quenedey des Ricets, Portrait of Maine de Biran, 1811 383
Notes on Contributors

Alessandra Aloisi
received her PhD in Aesthetics from the University of Pisa. College Lecturer at
the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oriel College, Oxford Univer-
sity: Core focus on modern French literature and philosophy, as well as cultural
exchanges between France and Italy. Specializing on pre-Freudian theoriza-
tions of the unconscious and the cross-fertilizations between medicine, litera-
ture, and philosophy. Alessandra Aloisi’s latest publications in English include:
Maine de Biran: Of Immediate Apperception, 1807, ed. A. Aloisi, M. Piazza, and
M. Sinclair, London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2020; Archeology of the Uncon-
scious, Italian Perspectives, ed. A. Aloisi and F. Camilletti, London/New York:
Routledge, 2019.

Benjamin J. Bâcle
received his PhD in Philosophy from Aston University in Birmingham. Lecturer
(Teaching) at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University College London:
PhD-thesis (2011) on Maine de Biran’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concep-
tions of will and their respective posterities. Specialization in epistemology,
philosophy and political thought in post-1789 France and Britain. Tracing criti-
cal responses to the spread of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, Benjamin Bâcle
is currently preparing a book-length historical comparison between French
and British anti-utilitarian writers (Victor Cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-
Marie Guyau, Jenny d’Héricourt, Anna Wheeler, John Stuart Mill, Matthew
Arnold and John Ruskin).

Michael A. Conway
received his PhD in Fundamental Theology from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universi-
tät, Freiburg i.Br., Germany. Rev. Professor in Faith and Culture at Saint
Patrick’s College, Pontifical University, Maynooth, Co Kildare: Fundamental
theology in dialogue with phenomenology (Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc
Marion); pragmatism, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion, espe-
cially in its accentuation by Maurice Blondel. Key publications of Michael Con-
way include: The Science of Life: Maurice Blondel’s Philosophy of Action and
the Scientific Method (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000 [European Univer-
sity Studies; Series xx—Philosophy, Vol. 616]); Encyclopedia entry: “Blondel,
Maurice” in the Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, ed. Daniel Patte, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
notes on contributors xv

Scott Davidson
received his PhD from Duquesne University, Pittsburg (2002). Department of
Philosophy, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia: Contempo-
rary French Philosophy (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel
Henry, Paul Ricoeur) and Theory (Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of
Law, Philosophy of Embodiment). In addition to being the editor of the Jour-
nal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Scott Davidson has recently edited
five books on Ricoeur, whose early philosophy of the will is of special concern
to him. Known for his meticulous translations of Michel Henry’s books and
articles, he has also co-edited (with Frédéric Seyler), The Michel Henry Reader
in 2019.

Anne Devarieux
received her PhD in Philosophy (on Maine de Biran) from Université de Paris-
iv, Panthéon-Sorbonne (2000). Senior Lecturer, habilitated to supervise re-
search. Assistant Director of the ea 2129 “Identity and Subjectivity” at the
Department of Philosophy, Université Caen Normandie: A specialist in nine-
teenth-century French philosophy and twentieth-century phenomenology, she
has notably published Maine de Biran, L’individualité persévérante (2004) and
L’intériorité réciproque. L’hérésie biranienne de Michel Henry (2018) both pub-
lished by Jérôme Millon (Grenoble). Author of many articles on Maine de Biran,
Henri Bergson, or Gabriel Tarde.

Mika Imono
received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toulouse ii (2013) and
a PhD in Philosophy from Doshisha University, Kyoto (2015). Associate Profes-
sor at the Department of Education, Meisei University, Tokyo: Subject of both
of her theses is a comparison between the philosophical concepts of Maine de
Biran and Kitarô Nishida. After completing her thesis in 2013, Mika Imono has
held various research and teaching appointments in Japanese Studies at the
Universities of Bordeaux Montaigne (2013–2015) and Strasbourg (2015–2019).
From 2019 to 2020, she was awarded the Hakuho Japanese Research Fellow-
ship, and subsequently pursued her studies as a Visiting Research Fellow at the
International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto (2019–2020).

Rolf Kühn
received his PhD (on Simone Weil) from Sorbonne University and Habilitation
(on Michel Henry) from the University of Vienna. Associate Professor (Emeri-
tus), Department of Philosophy, University of Freiburg: His books, translations
(Maine de Biran; Michel Henry), editorships and articles explore phenomenol-
xvi notes on contributors

ogy, psychological and philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of religion.

Co-editor of the series Soul, Existence, and Life (Karl Alber Publishing) and
co-founder of psycho-logik, a yearbook for psychotherapy, philosophy, and cul-
ture. Teaching and research appointments in Vienna, Beirut, Nizza, Lissabon,
and Freiburg im Breisgau. Latest publications include: Postmodernity and Phi-
losophy of Life (2019); Guiding Culture: Psychoanalyse, Philosophy, and Religion
(2020).

Marc Maesschalck
is Professor of Philosophy at uc Louvain in Belgium, where he leads the Cen-
tre for Philosophy of Law (cpdr). He has taught in Haiti, Quebec, Luxemburg,
Switzerland and France. A specialist of Fichte and Schelling, he has published
numerous studies in political and social philosophy, as well as in ethics and
legal theory. His latest works are Reflexive Governance for Research and Innova-
tive Knowledge, (Wiley-iste, 2017), La cause du sujet (Lang, 2015), Democracy,
Law and Governance (Ashgate, 2010) and Transformations de l’éthique (Lang,
2010). He also co-edited Fichte: la philosophie de la maturité (Europhilosophie
Editions, 2017) with Jean-Christophe Goddard.

Larry S. McGrath
received his PhD in Intellectual History from Johns Hopkins University (2014),
conducts anthropological research for technology and life science companies.
He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at jhu (2014–2015),
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Wesleyan University (2015–2017), and is currently
Senior Researcher at Facebook. His specialization is the history of neuro-
science and the cultural contexts of brain imaging. Larry has published articles
in Journal of the History of Ideas, Human-Computer Interaction, History of the
Human Sciences, and Modern Intellectual History. His book is Making Spirit
Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (University of
Chicago Press, 2020).

Manfred Milz
received his PhD in the History of Art from Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main
(2003) for a study on processual correlations between Alberto Giacometti and
Samuel Beckett. Senior Research Associate (since 2017) at the Institute of
Information and Media, Language and Culture of the University of Regens-
burg and Visiting Associate Professor (2023–2026) at the Faculty of Art, Design
and Architecture, University of Johannesburg. Guest-editor of The European
Legacy (2011); editor and co-author of Facing Mental Landscapes (2011), Paint-
ing the Persian Book of Kings Today (Cambridge 2010), the catalogue for Shah-
notes on contributors xvii

nameh Millennium exhibition at the Prince’s Gallery in London. Editor-in-chief

of the Brill-series Transcultural Aesthetics, founded in 2021 by the iaa. Aesthet-
ics.

Marco Piazza
received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Florence. Professor at
the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts, Univer-
sità Roma Tre, Rome: eighteenth–nineteenth-century French Literature and
Philosophy (Rousseau, Maine de Biran, Proust). His most recent works are
dedicated to the Philosophies of Habit: L’antagonista necessario (Milan: 2015);
Creature dell’abitudine (Bologna: 2018); Habit, Second Nature, and Disposition
(monographic dossier ed. by, «Paradigmi», 1–2020). Piazza has dedicated four
books to Maine de Biran, among these the first Italian and English editions of
the Mémoire de Berlin (the latter in collaboration with Alessandra Aloisi and
Marc Sinclair) and published (together with Denise Vincenti) on Biran’s Kant-
notes.

Eftichis Pirovolakis
received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sussex, UK (2006).
Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of the
Peloponnese, Greece: Deconstruction (Derrida), Phenomenology (Husserl),
Hermeneutics (Ricoeur, Gadamer), Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics. He is the author
of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruc-
tion and Hermeneutics (suny Press, 2010). His research concentrates on twen-
tieth-century continental philosophy. He served as assistant editor of the Bul-
letin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain (2007–2012), has translated Derrida
into English and Greek, and has co-edited, with Dorothea Olkowski, Deleuze
and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains (Routledge, 2019).

Warren Schmaus
received his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Pittsburg Univer-
sity (1980); AB, Princeton University (1974), is Professor of Philosophy at the
Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago: His major research interest is in
the philosophy of science in nineteenth and early twentieth century France. A
central focus of his extensive research is Durkheim’s philosophy of science. In
his most recent book, Schmaus explores Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge:
Charles Renouvier’s Political Philosophy of Science (Pittsburgh, 2018), and he has
also published several articles investigating the early development of the idea
of conventionalism in French philosophy of science.
xviii notes on contributors

Pietro Terzi
received his PhD in Philosophy from Université Paris-Nanterre and a PhD in
Philosophy from the San Carlo Foundation, Modena. Currently a Research As-
sociate with the Institute of Philosophy at Paris-Nanterre University, he spe-
cializes within historiography and theories of French philosophy (1850–1980)
on the Reception of Kant and Husserl; Rationalism, Idealism, Phenomenology;
Philosophy and the Sciences (Psychology and Sociology); Intellectual History
of the Third Republic and Post-Structuralism (Jacques Derrida). Pietro Terzi
has co-edited (with Stefano Marino) Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” in
the Twentieth Century (2020). Forthcoming in 2021 are monographs on Kantian
philosophy in France and on Léon Brunschvicg.

Björn Thorsteinsson
received his PhD in Philosophy from the Université Paris 8 (Vincennes-St.
Denis). Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iceland: He specializes
in twentieth-century French philosophy, German idealism, phenomenology,
poststructuralism, and the critique of ideology. He is the author of La ques-
tion de la justice chez Jacques Derrida (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), and has con-
tributed to The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology (2011) and the Black-
well Companion to Derrida (2014) as well as numerous other publications in
several languages, including translations into Icelandic of works by Rousseau,
Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Zahavi, Lazzarato, Bourdieu, Deleuze, and others.

Luís A. Umbelino
is holding a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy from the University
of Coimbra. Core Research on French reflexive tradition, especially on Maine
de Biran and his influences, on contemporary phenomenology of the body,
and on philosophical hermeneutics. Member of the Portuguese I&D Research
Unit cech-fluc/Portugal and of the Spanish research project “Fenomenolo-
gía del cuerpo y análisis del dolor ii.” Aside from being the editor-in-chief of the
Revista Filosófica de Coimbra, is the author respectively the co-author, of Soma-
tologia Subjetiva. Apercepção de Si e Corpo em Maine de Biran (2010); Memora-
bilia. O Lado Espacial da Memória (2020); Hermeneutic Rationality (2012) and
Corps ému / Corpo abalado. Essais de philosophie biranienne (2021).

Sean M. Quinlan
is Professor of History and Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sci-
ences at the University of Idaho. Quinlan received his ba (1992) from Arizona
State University, and his ma (1994) and PhD (2000), both from Indiana Uni-
versity. He was a Fulbright research fellow in France in 1996–1997 and Italy in
notes on contributors xix

2016–2017, and he has also received grants from the Mellon Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include The Great
Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity, and Health Crises in Revolutionary France,
ca. 1750–1850 (Ashgate, 2007) and Morbid Undercurrents: Medical Subcultures
and Literary Genre in Post-Revolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Denise Vincenti
is a Post-doctoral ra in the History of Psychology at the University of Milan-
Bicocca and ra in the History of Philosophy at the Institut Catholique of
Toulouse: Her interests focus on nineteenth-century French Philosophy
(Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, Henri Bergson, etc.) and
its intersections with medical and psychological science. Her publications
include: “Espace tactile et espace visuel. L’origine de la notion d’étendue chez
Jules Lachelier”, Revue de métaphysique et de morale (forthcoming), “Sogno e
follia. Il problema delle alterazioni della personalità nel Cours de psychologie
di Jules Lachelier,” Bollettino sfi (2020), and (with Marco Piazza), “The Self-
Apperception and the Knower as Agent: An Introduction to Maine de Biran’s
Notes about Kant,” Philosophical Inquiries (2016).

Our Translator

Jacob Watson
is a freelance translator/editor in Berlin, studied philosophy and languages
before obtaining his Diplôme avancé d’etudes françaises & traduction at the
Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg (2002). His fields are philosophy and law,
sociology and history, art and film, most notably for the law journal Ancilla
Luris of Zurich University of Applied Sciences (zhaw). Recent book transla-
tions are Eros, Lust and Sin by Franz X. Eder (forthcoming) and Work—the Last
1000 Years (2018) by Andrea Komlosy, with whom he teaches “Translating Work”
at the University of Vienna. Co-editor of “Sensing Collectives—Aesthetics and
Politics Intertwined” (tu Berlin, 2023).
Introduction

In the German post-Kantian Idealist tradition of the reflexive human self,

common denominators of psychoanalysis and phenomenology have been at
the core of many in-depth studies on the intersecting processes of introspec-
tion, consciousness, and the unconscious. This trajectory—so formative for
twentieth-century psychology1 and, concomitantly, more recent, the cognitive
sciences—is also represented in this present volume by using Maine de Biran’s
concept of interiority to compare the perspectives of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer.
The œuvre of the contemporary French spiritualist philosopher, whose
groundbreaking psycho-physiological and psycho-pathological investigations

1 Outstanding among the most relevant are the following investigations: Daniele de Santis,
Burt C. Hopkins, Claudio Majolino (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy, New York/London: Routledge, 2021; Gord Barentsen, Romantic
Metasubjectivity through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject, London/New
York: Routledge, 2020; Erik Stänicke, Anders Zachrisson & Arne Johan Vetlesen, “The Epis-
temological Stance of Psychoanalysis: Revisiting the Kantian Legacy,” The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 2020 89:2, 281–304; Brian D. Cox, The History and Evolution of Psychology: A Philo-
sophical and biological Perspective, New York/London: Routledge, 2019; Slavoj Žižek, Psycho-
analyse und die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus, translated by Isolde Charim and Lydia
Marinelli, Wien/Berlin: Turia + Kant Verlag, 2015; Nicolas Boyle and Liz Disley (eds.), The
Impact of German Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought: Volume 1, Philoso-
phy and the Natural Sciences, edited by Karl Ameriks, Cambridge University Press, 2013; James
Hopkins, “Psychoanalysis, representation, and neuroscience: the Freudian unconscious and
the Bayesian brain,” in Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Donald Pfaff, Donald and Martin A. Con-
way (eds), From the Couch to the Lab: trends in psychodynamic neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012; Elke Völmicke, Das Unbewusste im Deutschen Idealismus, Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2005; Jon Mills, The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s anticipation of psy-
choanalysis, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002; David Snelling, Philosophy,
Psychoanalysis, and the Origins of Meaning: Pre-reflective Intentionality in the psychoanalytic
View of the Mind, Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2001; John Gedo, The Evolution of Psychoanalysis:
Contemporary Theory and Practice, New York: Other Press, 1999; Manfred Frank, Unendliche
Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1997; Christopher Young and Andrew Brook, “Schopenhauer and Freud,”International Journal
of Psychoanalysis 75 (1994), 101–118; D.E. Pettigre, “The question of the relation of philoso-
phy and psychoanalysis: the case of Kant and Freud,” Metaphilosophy, 1990 21: 67–88; Odo
Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse, Köln:
Dinter, 1987; Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1984; Paul Ricoeur, Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1970; Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and
Evolution of dynamic Psychiatry, New York: Basic Books, 1970.

© Manfred Milz, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004683778_002

2 introduction

of the human self took the form of interior monologues,2 would later inspire
the founding expounders of psychoanalysis, yet this has received little critical
scrutiny until now.
Biran responded to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empiricist and
materialist philosophies of sensation and imagination that had cemented the
assumption of a passive human self. According to his seminal concept of
physio-spiritualism, constitution of consciousness is dependent on voluntary
physical effort—by virtue of the resistance required by inner apperception.
Thus Biran combines the voluntary with the spiritual: He argues that the con-
scious, active self is constituted in its sovereign autonomy, as free and undi-
vided, by what he calls the “effort hyperphysique” (a hyperphysical act of will)
and the resistance from the “non-moi” (the not-I) towards its own body and the
world.
Despite the groundbreaking novelty of this reformist concept, Maine de
Biran has been considered secondary in international phenomenological re-
search during the past two decades. However, it is arguable that Maine de Biran
should be added to the ranks of the pioneers of a radical phenomenological sci-
ence of human reality, René Descartes and Edmund Husserl. Husserl appears
to have neglected closely related works of his spiritual predecessor Maine de
Biran. However, Maine Biran acknowledged the Cartesian notion of res cogitans
and res extensa, and wished to reinterpret it through the crucial component of
human will. Maine de Biran did not necessarily argue against Descartes; rather,
his intention was to complete the project of his predecessor by rectifying it.
Henri Bergson, whose process philosophy is situated at the historical cross-
roads between spiritualism on the one hand and existentialist phenomenology
and poststructuralism on the other, counted Biran among his maîtres verita-
bles, along with Plotinus, Baruch de Spinoza, and George Berkeley.3 In “La Sci-
ence Française” (1915), he goes even further: “from the beginning of the century
France had a great metaphysician, the greatest she produced since Descartes
and Malebranche: Maine de Biran.”4 As early as 1897, a year after publishing
Matière et mémoire, he acknowledged that “there is a philosophy from which

2 Manfred Milz, “Diagnostic Concepts of the Unconscious as a Foundation of Romanticist

Identity: Maine de Biran’s Psycho-Physiological and Psycho-Pathological Self-Investigations,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Vol. 6 (2019), Issue 2: The Unconscious, edited by
Tanehisa Otabe, 103–119.
3 Floris Delattre, Ruskin et Bergson: de l’intuition esthétique à l’intuition métaphysique. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1947, 12.
4 Henri Bergson, Mélanges: l’idée de lieu chez Aristote, Durée et simultanéité, correspondance,
pièces diverses, documents. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972, 1172.
introduction 3

absolutely all of French spiritualism derives; it is that of Maine de Biran.”5 By the

end of the nineteenth century, the appreciation of Maine de Biran’s philosophy
was by no means restricted to France. The German philosopher, theologian,
and pedagogue Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) used Biran’s notion of the sensa-
tion d’effort in order to answer his own epistemic question of how a belief in
the reality of the external world is established. In 1890 Dilthey deemd him to
be the most outstanding psychological analyst in France during the first half of
the nineteenth century,6 counting “Maine de Biran and those French thinkers
related to him” (in line with Immanuel Kant, Gottlieb Fichte, and Thomas
Carlyle) to the epistemological genealogy of “the idealism of freedom.”7 More
recently, in the 1960s, Dimitri Voutsinas hailed him as the “fondateur de la psy-
chologie française.”8

How did Biran arrive at his physio-spiritualist conclusions and at which point
in his philosophical development? What are the historical and personal condi-
tions that gave rise to those innovative concepts that would prove to be influ-
ential for centuries?
Marie-François-Pierre Gonthier de Biran was born on 29 November 1766
in the Rue Sainte-Catherine 39 of Bergerac, in the Southwest of France. His
father, Jean Gonthier de Biran, was a Sieur du Maine and distinguished medical
doctor, who on June 30 1750 married a neighbor from the castle of Grateloup,
Camille Deville de Vermond.9 Most likely before 1787, their son assumed the
name “Maine de Biran” (after the hamlet “Le Maine” near Lestignac in the Dor-
dogne)10 that he henceforth also used as a nom du plume for his philosophical
work.
At age fifteen, Biran enrolled with the doctrinaires in Périgueux (Nouvelle-
Aquitaine),11 graduated from the Collège in 1784 and began to study law at the

5 Henri Bergson, “Revue Critique: Principes de métaphysique et de psychologie, par Paul

Janet.” Revue Philosophique, vol. 44 (November 1897), 550.
6 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die
Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht (1890),” in: Wilhelm Dilthey, Die geistige Welt;
Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswssenschaften: Einleitung in die Philosophie des
Lebens (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5). Leipzig: Teubner, 1957, 90–135.
7 Ibid., 402.
8 Dimitri Voutsinas, “Maine de Biran (1766–1824): Fondateur de la psychologie française,” in:
Revue internationale de philosophie 20 (1966), 75 (69–89).
9 Amable de La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824): essai de biographie historique
et psychologique (thèse pour le doctorat, L’Université de Paris), Paris: Fontemoing, 1914, 28.
10 Henri Gouhier, Maine de Biran par lui-même, Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1970, 15–21.
11 La Vallete-Monbrun, 30–32; Ernest Naville, Maine de Biran et ses pensées, Paris: Libraire
Joel Cherbuliez, 1857, 5.
4 introduction

University of Poitiers.12 However, the next year he traveled to Paris, at age eigh-
teen, to join the Royal Guard of Louis xvi at Noailles.13 He was wounded in one
of the defining moments of the French Revolution. On the sixth and seventh of
October of 1789,14 Maillard’s Women’s March on Versailles took place, while he
was defending the castle, awaiting backup from General Lafayette’s battaillon.
After the arrest of the King in Varenne in May 1792 and the subsequent procla-
mation of the Republic on 22 September 1792, the Royal Guard was disbanded
and supplanted by a constitutional guard.
Dismayed by the recent turn of events,15 Biran decided by the end of the year
to withdraw to the secluded manor of Grateloup, about nine kilometers from
Bergerac, where he weathered the entire période de la Terreur.16
There, at his family estate, the twenty-six-year-old began to devote himself
to extensive philosophical studies and writing17—in stark contrast to his brief
stay in Paris, where he had yielded to temptations, which he himself character-
ized as decadent and frivolous.18 Philanthropically inclined and patriotically
motivated, but also needing to secure additional financial resources, Biran,
the liberal Royalist, served as administrateur-adjoint of the Dordogne, between
May 1795 and April 1797,19 after the downfall of Robespierre, and from 1797 to
1798 a member of the Conseil des Cinq-Cents du Directoire.20 On 21 September
1795, he married Marie-Louise Fournier du Fardeil, the widow of M. du Cluzeau.
Eight months later, she gave birth to Félix, followed by Elisa and one additional
daughter.21 This period of domestic happiness, however, lasted less than a
decade and ended with the death of Marie-Louise on 26 October 1803.22 It took

12 Francis Charles Timothy Moore, “Chapter 7. French Spiritualist Philosophy,” in: Alan
D. Schrift and Daniel Conway (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Revolutionary Re-
sponses to the existing Order (The History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 2), London/New
York: Routledge, 2014 [2010], 163, footnote 11.
13 Agnès Antoine, Maine de Biran: sujet et politique, Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1999, 5. La Valette-Monbrun, 31; Naville, Maine de Biran et ses pensées, 9.
14 La Valette-Monbrun, 40–43.
15 Naville, Maine de Biran et ses pensées, 11–12.
16 Antoine, Maine de Biran: sujet et politique. 6.
17 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 43.
18 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 3132; Ernest Naville, Maine de Biran: sa
vie et ses pensées, 12.
19 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 77–97.
20 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 99–116.
21 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 101; Gouhier, Maine de Biran par lui-
même, 21–24. René Lacroze, Maine de Biran, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970, 2.
22 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 155–158; Gouhier, Maine de Biran par
lui-même, 21–24. René Lacroze, Maine de Biran, 2. The repeated biographical narration
introduction 5

Biran much more than one year to recover from this loss; he would never forget
his Louise, “l’épouse celeste,” as he called her in a passage of his Journal intime,
even fifteen years after her death and four years into his second marriage, for
he had married Louise-Anne Favareilhes de Lacoustète, on 3 May 1814.23
About a year before his death, in July 1823, Biran looked back at the immense
toll of and suffering and death caused by the violence of the French Revolution
in order to put ideals into effect and this reaffirmed his commitment to quiet
introspection as a means to understand human motivation:

The lastest crisis of the age which has brought as it were a second child-
hood of the affective faculties, is that which has most occupied me, and
makes me even more introverted. I venture to give a description of these
things as belonging to a series of psychological experiences. The affec-
tions belonging to the human soul make up the innermost part of the
science of our being; accounts of them are ordinarily of interest only
so far as they form part of a body of romantic facts or adventures; it is
this framework that the imagination, the faculty which is the liveliest of
all in most men, is almost always exclusively attached; one reads history
to know its facts, to speak to the point about them; or to find analogies
between the various epochs or revolutions in civil societies, etc. […] one
reads novels because of the extraordinary pictures they present to the
imagination to excite it, to the sensibility to move it, to the mind to move
it; but an account of the affections considered in themselves (or in the
various modes of this power to love, to suffer, to sympathize, or to live
with one’s fellows) and as principles determining actions, [whether] in
conformity with or opposed to the laws of our moral nature, an account
of this kind, I say, which would tend to bring to light the hidden basis of
human nature, has scarcely any attraction for anyone. Why is this? It is
because our love of ourselves always takes us outside ourselves as far as
possible, in order to avoid feeling our miseries, and seeing ourselves as
we are. And yet nothing is more necessary for our present and future life,
for everything which can really serve one or the other, than that inner life,
that confession which a loving and feeble soul makes to itself and to other

according to which Biran’s wife Louise died of a shock when her former husband du
Cluzeau, who had been presumed dead, suddenly reentered her life, is a legend, inspired
by Balzac’s novel Le Colonel Chabert, first published 1832 in the magazine L’Artiste (and in
1835 under the title La Comtesse à deux Maris). Most recently, this has been pointed out
by Monsieur Bories, a direct descendant of Maine de Biran, in a conversation with Anne
Devarieux in Grateloup, who has shared it with me.
23 Henri Gouhier, Maine de Biran. Œuvre choisies, Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1942, 8.
6 introduction

souls made to understand it, of these weaknesses and these loves. In this
way, human nature can be better known.24

Three crucial aspects of Biran’s psycho-physiological and psycho-pathological

investigations into his own self and the human self in general can be distilled
from this passage: first, an extraordinary confrontative exposure to himself in
the course of an interior monologue that is, at this late stage of his philosophy,
embedded in a mystical spiritualism; second, his aversion to and repudiation
of outward distractions (through media, e.g. books) in favor of consciously
concentrated affections; and third, the relevance of these for individual empa-
thy and social consciousness as determinants of practical, eventually moral,
actions. Actions are purposefully accentuated by Biran, in his diary, in the scien-
tific societies that he founded and in particular through his long-term political
practice, as well as in the educational theories that he developed towards the
end of his life.
It was between 1793 and 1795, during the formative period at Grateloup
manor that he started to keep daily notebook entries, consisting of existential
reflections. In this première journal intime, he documented, via introspective

24 Maine de Biran, “Juillet 1823,” in: Henri Gouhier (ed.), Maine de Biran–Journal ii, 1er Jan-
vier 1817 Mai 1824. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Bâconnière, 1955, 378–379 [My translation and
Biran’s emphasis—if not indicated otherwise in the following quotations of this introduc-
tion]. Biran: “La dernière crise de l’âge qui amené comme une 2ième jeunesse des facultés
affectives est celle qui m’a le plus occupé et me reticent encore plus près de moi-même.
Je hasarde d’en donner la description comme rentrant dans un cours d’expériences psy-
chologiques. Les affections propres de l’âme humaine forment tout ce qu’il y a de plus
intime dans la science de notre être; leur histoire n’intéresse ordinairement qu’autant
[?] qu’elle entre dans un cadre de faits ou d’aventures romanesques; c’est à ce cadre que
s’attache presque toujours exclusivement l’imagination, faculté la plus éveillée dans la plu-
part des hommes; on lit l’histoire pour connaître les faits, en parler à propos ou trouver
des analogies entre les diverses époques ou revolutions des sociétés civiles etc. … on lit
les romans à cause des tableaux extraordinaires qu’ils présentent à l’imagination pour
l’exciter, à la sensibilité pour l’émouvoir, à l’esprit pour l’émouvoir; mais l’histoire des affec-
tions considérées en elles-mêmes (ou dans les divers modes de cette puissance d’aimer de
souffrir, de sympathizer ou d’exister dans des êtres semblables) et comme principes qui
déterminent les actions [...] conformes soit opposées aux lois de notre nature morale, cette
histoire, dis-je, qui tendrait à mettre en lumière le fonds même de l’humanité qui se cache,
n’a guères d’attrait pour personne. Pourquoi cela? C’est que notre amour-propre nous porte
toujours au dehors le plus loin de nous qu’il est possible, afin d’éviter de sentir nos misères
et de nos voir tells que nous sommes. Et pourtant rien de plus necessaire pour notre vie
présente et future, pour tout ce qui peut server réellement à l’une et à l’autre que cette
vie intérieure, cette confession qu’une âme aimante et faible fait à elle-même et à d’autres
âmes faites pour l’entendre de ces faiblesses et de ces amours. Ainsi la nature humaine
peut être mieux connue.”
introduction 7

self-investigations the extent to which he was vulnerable (perhaps due to a

genetic predisposition) to paralyzing psychosomatic symptoms that seemed
dependent on weather conditions25—a hypersensitivity that, as excellently
analyzed by one of his first biographers, the Abbé Jean-Amable de la Valette-
Monbrun (1872–1930), incapacitated him and was at times painful and con-
stantly in need of treatment or at least numb. Accordingly, Maine de Biran
wrote as early as May 1794 about the interdependence between psychological
and physical constitution, that the activity of the soul, its status, was “deter-
mined by one or another state of the body” and that his will was not capable
of exercising power over his moral state.26 But the author and his diary were
also the products of a historical interim, a tempestuous transition character-
ized by the simultaneity of contesting retroactive and progressive perspectives
or clashing ideologies, of which most would prove to be in preliminary flux. It
was in this indeterminable atmospheric context that the mind’s changeability
became widespread, especially with respect to the events and the immediate
aftermath of the French Revolution.27
Permanently disadvantaged by his susceptibility to external circumstances
that he self-critically characterized twice after 1800 as molesse (mallebility), but
circumscribed before the mid-1790s,28 Biran’s personal need to become liber-

25 La Valette-Monbrun, Maine de Biran (1766–1824), 489. La Valette-Monbrun in his psycho-

logical analysis of Biran: “L’état d’âme du philosophe varie avec le baromètre et suivant les
degrés du thermomètre. Un temps beau et froid a le don de le mettre en des dispositions
sereines. Tombe-t-il une pluie fine plusieurs heures durant? Il lui semble que l’humidité le
pénètre tout entier, et il deviant mélancolique. Les brouillards s’étendent-ils en un épais
rideau sur la terre? Ils obscurcissent so esprit comme le ciel. L’orage s’amasse-t-il à l’hori-
zon? Il le porte déjà dans sa tête. Il n’est aucune secousse atmosphérique, si légère soit-elle,
qui échappe à son impressionabilité. Toute variation brusque du temps l’agite et le jette
dans le malaise. / Baromètre vivant, M. de Biran se trouve modifié différement par chaque
saison.”
26 Maine de Biran, Première Journal intime, “May 27th 1794,” in: Henri Gouhier (ed.), Maine de
Biran – Journal iii Agendas, Carnets et Notes. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Bâconnière, 1957,
6. Biran: “De quoi dépend donc l’état de mon âme? d’où viennent ces sentiments confus,
tumultueux, au travers desquels je ne me connais plus? Je fuis l’agitation, et sans cesse elle
se reproduit en moi malgré mes efforts; ma volonté n’exerce aucun pouvoir sur mon état
moral; elle approuve ou elle blâme, elle adopte ou elle rejette; elle se complaît ou elle se
déplaît; elle se livre ou elle fuit dans tels ou tells ou tels sentiments donnés, mais jamais
elle ne les procure, jamais elle ne les écarte: qu’est-ce donc que cette activité prétendue
de l’âme? Je sens toujours son état déterminé par tel ou tel état du corps; toujours remuée
au gré des impressions du dehors, elle est affaissée ou élevée, triste ou joyeuse, calme ou
agitée selon la température de l’air, selon une bonne ou mauvaise digestion.”
27 Denis Bertholet, Les Français par eux-mêmes, 1815–1885. Paris: Olivier Orban, 1991, 17–109.
28 Maine de Biran, “Première Journal intime,” May 27th 1794, in: Henri Gouhier (ed.), Maine
de Biran – Journal iii Agendas, Carnets et Notes. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Bâconnière,
8 introduction

ated from these passive stages, motivated him to forge the concept of a sturdy
proactive self that could eventually withstand the uncertainties of the imme-
diate post-revolutionary period:

I would like, if ever I could undertake something sustained, to investi-

gate the degree to which the mind is active, the degree to which it can
modify external impressions, increase or decrease their intensity by the
attention it gives them; I would like to examine the extent to which it is
master of that attention. This examination should, it seems to me, pre-
cede a good treatise on morality. Before seeking to direct our affections,
we should undoubtedly know what we can do about them. I have not seen
this treated anywhere. The moralists suppose that man can always give
himself affections, change his inclinations, destroy his passions; to hear
them tell it, the soul is sovereign, it commands the senses as mistress. Is
this really true, or to what extent is it true? How can this be done? This is
precisely what should be established.29

1957, 3. Biran: “Si je pouvais rendre cet état permanent, que manquerait-il à mon bon-
heur? J’aurais trouvé sur cette terre les joies du ciel. Mais une heure de ce doux calme va
être suivie de l’agitation ordinaire de ma vie; je sens déjà que cet état de ravissement est
loin de moi, il n’est pas fait pour un mortel; ainsi cette malheureuse existence n’est qu’une
suite de moments hétérogènes qui n’ont aucune stabilité; ils vont flottants, fuyants rapi-
dement, sans qu’il soit jamais en notre pouvoir de les fixer. Tout influe sur nous, et nous
changeons sans cesse avec ce qui nous environne. Je m’amuse souvent à voir couler les
diverses situations de mon âme; elles sont comme les flots d’une rivière, tantôt calmes,
tantôt agités, mais toujours se succédant sans aucune permanence.”
Maine de Biran, Première Journal intime, “25 December 1794,” in: Gouhier (ed.), Maine
de Biran – Journal iii, 17. Biran: “Jamais, malgré tous mes efforts et mes resolutions
antérieurs, je ne puis me posséder et garder mon sens froid; toutes les fibres de mon
cerveau sont si mobiles qu’elles cédent à l’impression des objets sans que je puisse arrêter
leur movement; entraîné en divers sens contraires, je ne suis que passiv, ma raison devient
nulle, je dis ce que je ne voudrais pas dire, je fais ce que je ne voudrais pas faire …”.
29 Maine de Biran, Première Journal intime, “May 27th 1794,” in: Henri Gouhier (ed.), Maine de
Biran – Journal iii Agendas, Carnets et Notes. Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Bâconnière, 1957, 6
[Translation mine]. Biran: “Je voudrais, si jamais je pouvais entreprendre quelque chose de
suivi, rechercher jusqu’à quel point l’âme est active, jusqu’à quel point elle peut modifier
les impressions extérieurs, augmenter ou diminuer leur intensité par la attention qu’elle
leur donne, examiner jusqu’où elle est maîtresse de cette attention. Cet examen devrait, ce
me semble, précéder un bon traité de morale. Avant de chercher à diriger nos affections, il
faudrait sans doute connaître ce que nous pouvons sur elles. Je n’ai vu cela traité nulle part.
Les moralistes supposent que l’homme peut toujours se donner des affections, changer ses
penchants, détruire ses passions; à les entendre, l’âme est souveraine, elle commande aux
sens en maîtresse: cela est-il bien vrai? ou jusqu’à quel point cela l’est-il? comment cela
peut-il se faire? C’est justement ce qu’il faudrait bien établir.”
introduction 9

A dairy entry from about six months later, on 25 December 1794, shows how
occupied Biran’s mind was with a detailed execution of this project. In an
extensive passage, similar in its rhetoric diction to the aforementioned, Biran
recommended to Swiss, French, and Italian pioneers of experimental physi-
ology (mostly physicians, anatomists, or surgeons) to follow the example of
the Italian Jesuit, philosopher, and physicist Lazzaro Spalanzani (1729–1799),
who had courageously swallowed various substances at his own risk in order to
study the functions of his digestion. Conducting a series of self-experiments
with unorthodox diets, according to Biran, would advance the progress of
physiology.30 Biran’s own reflections of introspective psycho-physiological and
psycho-pathological self-investigations incorporated, indeed, just such an ap-
proach and went well beyond it. To interrogate what he addressed (in the
mechanical tradition of French materialism) as “the human machine,” he is
very explicit in pointing out, required a psychology that was to be synthetically
modeled, in its methodology and differentiated terminology, as “experimen-
tal physics.”31 Maine de Biran’s elaborate ideas pointed here indeed towards
an early historical stage of sensory psychology that was to be foundational for
experimental psychology: that of psychophysics, first developed and put into
practice by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), Johannes Müller (1801–1858)
and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894).
Biran clearly saw the potential for a solidified proactive postrevolution-
ary self, emerging from the introspective self-examinations reflected in diary
entries, as a thoroughly theorized and differentiated entity, to offer a certain
advantage to future French generations, a preventive measure, so to say. For
Biran’s undertaking was not to pursue critical questions about the dark side of
human nature, but rather to save society from falling victim to it once again.
He put a positive, holistic psychology for the practical good of mankind on his
agenda and not just methodologies to investigate illnesses. In that, he differed

30 Maine de Biran, Première Journal intime, “December 25th 1794,” in: Henri Gouhier (ed.),
Maine de Biran – Journal iii, 17.
31 Maine de Biran, Première Journal intime, “December 25th 1794,” in: Henri Gouhier (ed.),
Maine de Biran – Journal iii, 18. Biran: “Lorsqu’on est psychologue, on se sent quelquefois
exister par la tête, et alors les idées viennent en foule: d’autrefois, c’est dans la region pré-
cordiale, et, dans ces cas, on sent sans penser. A quoi cela tient-il? L’âme changerait-elle de
place? Qu’est-ce que la place d’un être qui n’a pas de parties? En vérité, je suis surprise de
l’ignorance où l’on est sur cette machine humaine, du peu de progrès que l’on fait jusqu’ici
pour en démêler les resorts, de l’indifférence que l’on y met, enfin de la manière gauche
dont on s’y est pris! Les métaphysiciens nous ont donné leurs rêves, leurs mots vagues et
vides de sens: on a pris cela pour de la science. Pourquoi ne traite-t-on pas la psychologie
comme la physique expérimentale? Est-ce autre chose?”
10 introduction

from Sigmund Freud, who was nonetheless aware of some of Biran’s writings.
Biran examined the historical lineage that stretches from British Empiricism
and the materialism of the French Enlightenment to Condillac’s sensualism.
Biran concluded that the materialist concepts of Julien Offray de la Mettrie,
Claude Adrien Helvétius, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, and especially those con-
ceived by Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, which had been most
pertinently derived from the Empiricism of John Locke, David Hume, and oth-
ers,32 encouraged the view of a passive self. In this, his concern was to address
especially the utilitarian and hedonistic tendencies that he had also detected
in himself during his first tempting years in Paris.33 Maine de Biran’s own
experience had taught him to be critical of outward-oriented sentiment—a
mere socially determined role-play—that can lead to a purposefully trained or
conditioned habitual behavior34 that posed, from his perspective, a danger to
authentic individuality and thus to the French society as a whole and needed
to be curbed.35 Maine de Biran’s aim was by no means the total repudiation of
Cartesian, empiricist, and sensory notions; he hoped to thoroughly reform and
extend these traditions, in order to counter strong materialist tendencies that
seemed to be overwhelming French society.
The trajectory of this ambitious project, which would occupy him for the rest
of this life, can be structured, following the chronology of Naville and Debrit,

32 For Biran’s physio-spiritualism as a direct counter-response to these French materialists,

see Pierre F. Daled, Chapitre ii: L’Histoire comparée des Systèmes de Philosophie, rela-
tivement aux Principes des Connaissances Humaines de Dégerando (1804), in Le matéri-
alisme occulté et la genèse du “sensualisme” – Écrire l’histoire de la philosophie en France,
Paris: J. Vrin, 2005, 29–59 and concerning Biran’s refutation of British, respectively Scottish
Empiricism, see Philip P. Hallie, Maine de Biran–Reformer of Empiricism 1766–1824, Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1959; to be updated and combined with John W. Yolton,
Chapter 7. Journal Presentations and Chapter 8. Locke among the ‘Philosophes’, in: Idem,
Locke and French Materialism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 159–206 and Stuart Brown
(ed.), British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, London/New York: Routledge, 2004
[1996].
33 For influences of the materialist upon sensualist philosophers see also Martin S. Staum,
Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution, Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980, 33.
34 See Milz, “Diagnostic Concepts of the Unconscious as a Foundation of Romanticist Iden-
tity,” 104, in reference to Reddy, W. The Navigation of Feeling—A Framework for the History
of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [2001], 258–259. Biran voiced
in his Journal intime repeatedly his aversion against the hypocracy of what he considered
a mere social stage.
35 See for instance the epistolary novel by the French General (under Napoleon Bonaparte),
polititian and writer Pierre-Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dan-
gereuses, Paris: Durand Neveu, 1782.
introduction 11

into three distinct stages. The first, the philosophy of sensation, from 1793 to
1804, that displays Biran as a critical student of the idéologues, Condillac, Caba-
nis, and de Tracy, and of the experimental physiologist Xavier Bichat, the sec-
ond, the philosophy of will (volonté), from 1804 to 1818, and the third, the philos-
ophy of religion, respectively mystical spiritualism, from 1818 to 1824.36

1 First Phase: A Philosophy of Sensation, 1793–1804

Let us initially examine young Biran’s thinking and writing under the immedi-
ate influence of contemporary ideas about the role of the senses. In his later
thirties, Biran would become well aware that realizing his project required in
practice a dynamically creative reciprocity between a political vita activa and a
philosophical vita contemplativa. Philosophy was to provide solid foundations
of political and long-term action steps for an authentically moral progressive
society. In this respect, politics was to produce an education reform. In 1800 and
in 1801, Biran participated in a concours organized by the Parisian Académie de
sciences morales et politiques with two versions of his Mémoire sur l’influence de
l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking).
The second version was selected as the winning entry and published—with
additional annotations—by Biran himself in 1802.37 There were legitimate rea-
sons why two members of the prize committee, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt
de Tracy and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, appreciated and preferred his sec-
ond submission, as opposed to the printed version. Together with Joseph Marie
Degérando, Pierre Laromiguière, and others, they formed a circle of philoso-
phers called idéologues, who advocated the Essay on the Origin of Human
Knowledge and in particular the Traite de sensations of 1754, in which Éti-
enne Bonnot de Condillac had proposed that the self passively received sense
impressions. In his model, as the idéologues critically noted, Condillac had also
taken the sense of touch into consideration; therefore, his theory could not

36 Ernest Naville, Introduction Générale aux Œuvres inédites de Maine de Biran, avec la Col-
laboration de Marc Debrit. Paris: Dezobry, E. Magdeleine et Cie, Libraires-Éditeurs, 1859,
vi–vii.
37 Maine de Biran, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser. Ouvrage qui remporté le
prix sur cette question, propose par la classe des sciences morales et politiques de l’Institut
national: “Déterminer quelle est l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser; ou, en
d’autres termes, faire voir l’effet que produit sur chacune de nos facultés intellectuelles, la
fréquente répétition des mêmes opérations.” Paris: Henrichs, an xi [1802]. First translation
into English: Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, translated
by Margret Donaldson Boehm. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1929.
12 introduction

be legitimately situated in an exclusively passive mode. To illustrate his point,

Condillac had described a thought experiment of a flying statue, suspended
in a sphere, which was conscious of its own body through touch alone, and
which used only this to explore the physical world around it. Cabanis sug-
gested in his essay On the Relations between the Physical and the Moral Aspects
of Man (1798) that the same argument was valid in the case of a fetus in a
mother’s womb. Destutt de Tracy was the first to tentatively initiate a reform
of the sensory doctrine in his Mémoire sur faculté de penser and in his “Disser-
tation sur quelques question d’idéologie” (both published in 1798). To perceive
itself consciously—merely through its body—the author clarifies, regardless
whether we are dealing with the case of a flying statue or a fetus, that inner
tactility suffices—facilitated by physical effort and the sensation of resistance
resulting from it.38
Biran positively acknowledged Destutt de Tracy’s intervention through what
the idéologue had termed in the first volume of his Mémoires de la classe des
sciences morales et politiques as early as 1795 “motility” (motilité).39 In contrast
to his first submission, Biran was thus distancing himself from Condillac’s doc-
trine only months later in the print version of his Analyse de la pensée, in which
he introduces a distinction between passive sensations (impressions passives;
sensibilité) and active perceptions (conscience) that are, conducted by the will
(volonté) against resistance, executed through physical effort in order to expe-

38 Daniel Heller-Roazen, Chapter Twenty-One, “Of Flying Creatures,” in The Inner Touch—
Archaeology of Sensation, New York: Zone Books, 2007, 219–236. In his excellent analysis
of the French physio-spiritual tradition, Heller-Roazen underscores the fact that the Idé-
ologues neglected the Arabic-Persian philosopher Abū Alī al-Husain ibn Abd Allāh ibn
Sīnā, better known to the Western culture as “Avicenna” (‫أبو علي الحسين بن عبد الله ابن‬
‫سينا‬, 980–1037). Avicenna’s influence is traced throughout the Middle Ages. Far beyond
Heller-Roazen’s description, though, Avicenna revisited this issue extensively throughout
his work. In four of Avicenna’s books, Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus (Kitāb
al-Nafs), his Book of Directives and Remarks (‫)الإشارات والتنبيهات‬, Ḥikma mašriqiyya or
al-Mašriqiyyūn and Risāla Aḍḥawiyya fī l-maʿād, the philosopher concluded, while specu-
lating about an individual suspended in space (e.g. flying) that its very feeling of being and
existence exclusively stems from its corporeality. See also Tommaso Alpina, “The Soul of,
The Soul in itself and the Flying Man Experiment,”Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 28/2018:
187–224.
39 Biran, Influence de l’habitude, 20–21. Biran: “Le citoyen Destout de Tracy est le premier
qui ait clairement rattaché l’origine de la connaissance, de la distinction de nos manières
d’être entre elles, et du moi qui les éprouve, du jugement enfin d’existence réelle et de tous
les autres jugemens qui en dérivent, à la faculté de mouvoir, ou à la motelité volontaire.”
Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, translated by Margret
Donaldson Boehm, with an introduction by George Boas, Westport, Connecticut: Gree-
wood Press Publishers, 1970, 56.
introduction 13

rience the surrounding physical world. However, in the first part, Sensations
et perceptions, §2, “Impression de résistance. Organe du tact,” of his first essay
from 1800, he had been forging a path towards this critical modification already,
by exemplifying the interactive functioning of these properties even with “an
individual suspended in the void” (who is solely dependent on his own physi-
cal resistance). He illustrates this by reexamining Cabanis’s observations about
the situation of a fetus in its mother’s womb.40
Biran consequently applied this theorem to his distinction between passive
habits (habitudes passives) that are connected to sensations and active habits
(habitudes actives) that are connected to perception.41 By underscoring the
main function of the introspective consciousness in its potential to resist the
consequences of habit, he accentuates the sovereignity of the human self in
both the first and second versions submitted for the competition. But it is only
in the second version that he breaks free from the idealist doctrines that were
his original starting point:

Effort necessarily entails the perception of a relation between the being

who moves, or who wishes to move, and any obstacle whatsoever that is
opposed to its movement; whithout a subject or a will which determines
the movement, without something which resists, there is no effort at all,
and without effort no knowledge, no perception of any kind. / If the indi-
vidual did not will or was not determined to begin to move, he would
know nothing. If nothing resisted him, he likewise would know nothing,
he would not suspect any existence; he would not even have an idea of
his own existence.42

40 Maine de Biran, Mémoires sur l’influence de l’habitude, édité par Gilbert Romeyer-Dherbey,
coll. Œuvres de Maine de Biran (tome ii), publiées sous la direction de François Azouvi,
Paris: J. Vrin, 1987, 40. Biran: “L’individu qui agite ses membres, ou se meut, le supposât-on
suspendu dans le vide, éprouvera nécessairement une espèce particulière d’impression,
qui naît de la résistance opposée par ces muscles, et de l’effort fait pour les mettre en
jeu. / Cet effort, simple et multiple, est très nettement perçu ou distingué par l’être qui
l’exerce; cela ne peut être ses que les organes moteurs réagissent sur le centre où réside la
cause active du mouvement. / Le fœtus, éprouvant déjà sans doute quelques impressions
sourdes, execute dans la matrice divers mouvements spontanés; resserré dans un espace
étroit, environné d’un fluide, il ne peut se mouvoir sans recontrer un obstacle ou lutter
contre une résistance extérieure.”
41 For a detailed discussion, see Milz, “Diagnostic Concepts of the Unconscious,” 6–8.
42 Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 58; Influence de L’Habitude, 137–138. Biran: “L’effort
emporte nécessairement avec lui la perception d’un rapport entre l’être qui meut ou qui
veut mouvoir et un obstacle quell-conque qui s’oppose à son movement, […] sans uns sujet
ou une volonté qui détermine le mouvant; sans un terme qui résiste, il n’y a point d’effort et
14 introduction

“Effort”–“will”–“knowledge”–“idea” and “existence” would become some of the

most reoccurring terms and topics in Maine de Biran’s treatment of thought
and movement. His first major work laid the foundation for further, even more
radical revisions of the ambiguities regarding psychology that he had inherited
from the idéologues (and from the theoretical assumptions of the empiricists).

2 Second Phase: A Philosophy of Will (Volonté), 1804–1818

For several years, liberated from political commitments and administrative

obligations, Maine de Biran could devote himself to creative philosophical
studies and enjoy domestic life in his growing family. During Napoleon Bona-
parte’s empire, beginning on 13 March 1805, though, he became conseiller de
prefecture du département de la Dordogne.43 Biran also submitted another trea-
tise, the Mémoire sur la décompositon de la pensée (Essay on the Division of
Thinking) as a reply to a contest question proposed by the Académie française:
“How is the faculty of thinking organized and what are the fundamental func-
tions that are to be recognized in it?”44 This time, he was not just awarded
the prize by the organizing committee; he was also elected as a member of
the Institute de France. With this project, Biran inaugurated the second and
central stage of his œuvre, the philosophie de la volonté (philosophy of will).
Resolutely continuing Condillac’s project implied, paradoxically, not just dis-
tancing himself from the purely sensory theory of knowledge altogether, but
explicitly revising it.
Maine de Biran appears to have been trying to harmonize the concepts of the
Ideologists’ circle with those of the physiologists. He felt that what Condillac
had termed in his Traite de Sensations “le sentiment fundamental,” was based on
faulty reasoning. Biran, in turn, is distinctly underscoring with particular refer-
ence to the foundation of personality and existence, a symbiotic relationship
between the lived body and consciousness (respectively knowledge):

sans effort point de connaissance, point de perception d’aucune espèce. / Si l’individu ne

voulait pas ou n’était pas déterminé à commencer de se mouvoir, il ne connaîtrait rien. Si
rien ne lui résistait, il ne connaîtrait rien non plus; il ne soupçonnerait aucune existence,
il n’aurait pas même d’idée de la sienne propre.”
43 La Valette-Monbrun, 164–165.
44 Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, précédé du Mémoire sur les
rapports de l’idéologie et des mathématiques, édité par François Azouvi, coll. Œuvres de
Maine de Biran (tome iii), publiées sous la direction de François Azouvi, Paris: J. Vrin,
1988, 19.
introduction 15

I see here a universal module, an instrument which serves to know, to

measure objects, but this instrument itself—how is it known at first, for
it too is an object for the self which begins to use it, and before it has
yet applied it to any other part, denied to anything foreign. The analyst
thus does not venture back up far enough. This fundamental character of
external relation, which he assigns to the particular exercise of a sense,
he already assumed it and made use of it long before bringing touch into
play. Whenever, for example, it was a question of locomotion or of the
direction of an organ such as sight, how could he not derive some rel-
ative sensation from it? How could the subject of the effort be entirely
confused with the organic term? How could any mobile organ have been
constantly directed without being known? It was therefore necessary that
the acts and movements should be as automatic as they can be under the
law of instinct.45

As he was critically elaborating throughout this stage of his œuvre, Condillac’s

and de Tracy’s understanding was minted by Descartes, who had neglected the
crucial role of the body with regard to the modi of existential feeling ( Je sens)
and knowing (qui je sens).46 In the psycho-physiological investigations central

45 Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, 137. Biran: “Je vois bien là
un module universel, un instrument qui sert à connaître, à mesurer des objets, mais cet
instrument lui-même comment est-il connu d’abord, car lui aussi est objet pour le moi qui
commence à s’en servir, et avant qu’il l’ait encore appliqué à aucune autre partie, ni à rien
d’étranger. L’analyste ne remonte donc pas encore assez haut. Ce caractère fundamental
de relation extérieure, qu’il assigne à l’exercice particulier d’un sens, il l’a supposé déjà et
en a fait usage longtemps avant de mettre le toucher en jeu. Toutes les fois qu’il s’est agi,
par exemple, de la locomotion ou de la direction d’un organe tel que la vue, comment a-t-
il pu ne pas en dériver quelque sensation relative? Comment le sujet de l’effort a-t-il pu se
confondre entièrement avec le terme organique? Comment un organe mobile quelconque
a-t-il été constamment dirigé sans être connu? Il falait donc que les actes et mouvements
fussent aussi automatiques qu’ils peuvent l’être sous la loi de l’instinct.”
46 Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, 108. Referencing Fichte, Biran
writes: “L’action, telle que nous pouvons la concevoir, comporte nécessairement l’idée d’un
sujet et d’un terme. C’est une idée relative, et l’erreur des métaphysiciens qui ont conçu un
moi, une pensée substantielle distincts de tout mode accidentel, a été de considerer cette
pensée ou ce sentiment fondamental comme absolu. C’est là le premier pas de Descartes
dans le monde purement abstrait, c’est aussi l’origine de l’idéalisme.” See also Biran’s “Notes
sur l’idéologie de M. de Tracy,” in: Commentaires et marginalia: dix-neuvième siècle, édités
par Joël Ganault, coll. Œuvres de Maine de Biran (Tome xi-3), publiées sous la direction
de François Azouvi, Paris: J. Vrin, 1990, 2. Biran: “Il est impossible de concevoir une sensa-
tion qui ne serait pas dans une partie du corps proper. Lorsqu’il y a moi, une personnalité
distincte, cette sensation est localisée; lorsqu’il n’y a pas de moi ou de sujet connaissant
16 introduction

to his anthropological project, the science of man, Biran was adopting, in this
and other of his writings, the motto of the seventeenth-century Dutch physi-
cian Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738), “homo simplex in vitalitate, homo duplex
in humanitate,”47 “man is simple by the fact that he is alive; dual-natured by
the fact that he is human,” to transparently position his hypothesis of a dual,
passive and active nature of man against the one-dimensional sensualist (and
materialist) tradition. As an alternative to exclusive receptivity, Biran insists on
emphasizing a primary duality, consisting of apperception and an observation
that is actively conscious of its perception. Explicitly against the Cartesian tra-
dition of a res cogitans, Biran argues that the self attains consciousness of its
individual existence through a corporeal effort of interiority:

But on the one hand, the self, or the true subject of attribution of the acts
or the willed effort, cannot be conceived of according to an ontological
notion anymore than it can be conceived of according to an image. The
idea of its individuality and of all that belongs to it, can be drawn from
its innermost reflection (réflexion intime) or from the feeling of the self-
same effort, of which it is at once both the subject and the cause identical
to it. Therefore, the determination of this idea as to its value and its origin,
cannot belong to an abstract ontological science nor to a science of the
phenomena.48

qui se distingue du corps en distinguant les parties de ce corps les unes des autres, c’est
simplement la combinaison organisée qui est affectée, pâtit ou jouit dans son étendue ou
quelqu’une de ses parties non distinctes. Dans tous les cas, l’hypothèse d’un être qui senti-
rait et connaîtrait son existence sans se sentir un corps ou dans un corps, est inadmissible;
c’est l’hypothèse de Descartes renouvelée par Condillac et Tracy.”
47 Biran consulted his library-edition: Hermann Boerhaave, Praelectiones academicae de
morbis nervorum, quas ex auditorum manuscriptis collectas edi curavit Jac. van Eems (two
vols.), Leyden 1761/Franfort 1762: Petrus van der Eyck and Cornelius de Pecker. The con-
text of this to Biran’s proverbial formula is crucial and of high relevance for his theory
of physio-spiritualism: “Ergo homo est duplex in humanitate, simplex in vitalitate; hinc
Sydenhamo, dum videbat, […] cogitatio de homine interno, in quo non est plus corporei,
quam corporeum est in eo, quod volo, ut manus mea moveatur […].” See Geneviève Barbi-
llion, Les Lectures de Maine de Biran. Bibliographie dressée d’après les livres qui composent
actuellement la bibliothèque du château de Grateloup, Grenoble: Imprimerie Allier Père et
Fils, 1927, 12. Biran extracted the quote from volume ii, part 2, 496–497.
See Carla Canullo, “The Body and the Self-Identification of Conscious Life. The Science
of Man between Physiology and Psychology in Maine de Biran,” in Analecta Husserliana
(The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research) lxvi, entitled The Origins of Life (Vol. i):
The Primogenital Matrix of Life and its Context, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Dor-
drecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, 203–223.
48 Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décompositon de la pensée. Introduction et notes critiques
introduction 17

Furthermore, Biran specifies with his original fact that the human self cannot
exist for itself without possessing the feeling or the inner immediate appercep-
tion of the co-existence of the body. But the self could well exist and have this
apperception, he stressed, without also recognizing its body as an object of the
imagination or of contemplation through the exercise of the sense of touch.
In order to be conscious of its bodily existence, a human being does not
depend on external senses (touch or smell); one internal sensation, as Biran
points out, is ample. The self and the body are indiscernible in shaping individ-
uality, identity, and transcendental liberty, as Anne Devarieux has explored.49
According to his most pertinent notion of physio-spiritualism, consciousness
is, in its permanent constitution, dependent on voluntary corporeal effort—
precisely by the resistance implied in processual acts of (ap)perception. In
short, Biran is claiming that the conscious, active self is constituted in its
sovereign autonomy, as free and undivided, by what he calls the “effort hyper-
physique” (a hyperphysical act of will), volonté and the resistance of the “non-
moi” (the not-I).
While carefully assessing the terminology that Biran employs, the influ-
ence of Marie-Francois-Xavier Bichat becomes obvious. Bichat writes: “The
measure of life then, in general, is the difference which exists between the
effort of external powers, and of internal resistance. The excess of the former
announces its weakness; the predominance of the latter is an indication of its
strength.”50
Biran’s work as a philosopher persistently evolved alongside his political
activities and the foundation of scientific societies or smaller philosophical cir-
cles. This delicately balanced reciprocity between vita contemplativa and vita
activa proved to be inspiring for Biran and for his entourage. With close friends
and colleagues Biran debated how and to what extent psychologically moti-

par Pierre Tisserand. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952, 145–146. Biran: “Mais
d’une part, le moi, ou le véritable sujet d’attribution des actes ou de l’effort voulu ne peut
se concevoir sous une notion ontologique pas plus que sous une image. L’idée de son indi-
vidualité et de tout ce qui lui appartient ne peut être tirée d’ailleurs que de sa réflexion
intime ou du sentiment du même effort, dont il est à la fois le sujet et la cause identique,
donc la détermination de cette idée quant à sa valeur et son origine, ne peut appartenir à
une science ontologique abstraite ni à une science objective des phénomènes.”
49 Anne Devarieux, L’intériorité réciproque: L’hérésie biranienne de Michel Henry, Grenoble,
Editions Jérôme Millon, 2018, 56. Devarieux: “se tient au carrefour, au point de junction
entre ces deux spheres qu’elle articule, dont l’ego vivant est l’articulation elle-même.”
50 Xav. Bichat, Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort, Paris: Brosson & Gabon, An
xiii–1805 [An 1799] 2. Engl. edition: Physiological Researches upon Life and Death, trans-
lated by Tobias Watkins. Philadelphia: Smith & Maxwell, 1809, 2.
18 introduction

vated philosophical concepts could be applied to and implemented, through

political measures, for the immediate and future benefit of the French society.51
During his time as a Sous-préfet de Bergerac (1806–1812)52 and delegate in the
Corps Législatif (1810–1812),53 he successfully submitted two more discourses
to international competitions that were facilitated by the academies of Berlin
and Copenhagen. We cannot but interpret the fruits of Biran’s vita contempla-
tiva in the light of his vita activa.
The essay De l’apperception immédiate,54 that Biran sent in 1807 to the Aca-
démie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres in Berlin, was closely building—due
to the related nature of the main question raised within the contest announced
in the Moniteur français on 31 October 1805—upon the core of his most recent
thesis Sur la décompositon de la pensée. In this announcement, the Academy
of Berlin was calling upon a closer examination of “the primitive facts of inner
sense” in positioning four intertwined questions:

Are there internal immediate apperceptions?

In what way does internal apperception differ from intuition?
What difference is there between intuition, sensation and feeling?
What are the relations of these acts or states of mind with notions and
ideas?55

What he had been calling le tact affectif (“affective touch”) in the second essay
submitted to the Academy of France, with reference to the inner bodily sen-
sation, he had now elaborated into le tact immédiate (“immediate touch”).
In §1, Sensitive or Passive System, of Chapter iii, “Application of the Pre-
ceding to an Analysis or Division of the External Senses. Commentary on
how we can deduce a real Distinction between the Faculties or States of the
Soul whose Differences we are investigating. Division of the three systems:

51 With reference to an application-oriented philosophy, respectively to scientific theories,

see (next to Agnès Antoine), Gerhard Funke, Philosophisches und Politisches Denken zwis-
chen Ancien Régime und Bürgertum in Frankreich, Bonn: Bouvier, 1947.
52 La Valette-Monbrun, 177–198.
53 Antoine, Maine de Biran: sujet et politique, 6; La Valette-Monbrun, 197– 98; Naville, Maine
de Biran: sa vie et ses pensées, 50–71.
54 Maine de Biran, De l’aperception immédiate (Mémoire de Berlin 1807), édité par Ives Radriz-
zani, coll. Œuvres de Maine de Biran (tome iv), publiées sous la direction de François
Azouvi, Paris: J. Vrin, 1995.
55 Ibid., 3; Engl. edition Of Immediate Apperception, with an introduction by Alessandra
Aloisi and Marco Piazza; translated by Mark Sinclair, London: Bloomsbury Publishing
2020, 23.
introduction 19

sensitive, perceptive or intuitive, and apperceptive,” he wrote, while categoriz-

ing immediate impressions into external perceptions and internal appercep-
tions:

The faculty or rather general receptive capacity of all immediate impres-

sions made on the nervous extremities by some cause (x), external or
internal, includes all the facts of living and simply sensory nature that can
be observed, either from a physiological point of view and wholly outside
of the self, or from the perspective of immediate tactility [tact] whose
relations we have already studied, and which, though related to con-
sciousness, do not enter into the domain of the latter since they remain
on the limits that separate our two natures.56

In §3 “Active Apperceptive System,” Biran unfolded the core of what he con-

sidered to be his anthropological program. From Biran’s viewpoint, the core
of human anthropology constitutes itself of (ultimately socio-)psychological
components, as a society ideally consists of individuals. Regarding an authenti-
cally evolving consciousness for existence, the originality of immediate internal
apperception is accentuated in its generation through effort and résistance, over
immediate external apperception, which is “still” (Biran uses the word “encore”)
not situated in a mediated state, but is nonetheless as straightforward as its
correspondent external equivalent. He characterizes it as being rather artifi-
cial and explicitly deceptive (“qui nos fait croire plutôt que sentir une existence
étrangère”):

Immediate internal apperception, which includes the feeling of the coex-

istence of our body and the still immediate external apperception, which
makes us believe in rather than feel an existence foreign to us, there-
fore come together and coincide (according to the order of time) with
the primordial exercise of the same living force. Is this exercise free and
immediately apperceptible in organic resistance? This is the self and its

56 Maine de Biran, Of Immediate Apperception, with an introduction by Alessandra Aloisi and

Marco Piazza; translated by Mark Sinclair, London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2020, 119; De
l’aperception immédiate, 139. Biran: “La faculté, ou plutôt la capacité générale receptive de
toutes les impressions immédiates faites sur les extrémités nerveuses par une cause quel-
conque (x), externe ou interne, comprend tous les faits de la nature vivante et simplement
sentante qui peuvent être observés, soit dans un point de vue physiologique et tout à fait
en dehors du moi, soit dans cette sorte de tact immédiat dont nous avons déjà étudié les
rapports et qui, rapprochés, jusqu’a un certain point de la conscience, n’entrent point dans
son domaine propre, mais restent sur les limites qui séparent nos deux natures.”
20 introduction

body, object of immediate internal apperception. Is it constrained by a

fixed obstacle? It is still me and the foreign body, object of mediate exter-
nal apperception, in which the absolute resistance of matter obscures, in
consciousness, the proper, relative resistance of the organs obeying the
same will.57

Biran argued, as he did in his previous essay from 1805, that it is this phys-
ical resistance that provides our bodily interiority with an unlimited exten-
sion, respectively unlimited space that represents—furnished through muscu-
lar effort—practically an equivalent of existence. This conspicuous element is
central to his physio-spiritualism that he continues to interrogate in his Berlin
Mémoire; for instance, in §5 “From the immediate Perception to the Feeling of
the Coexistence of the Body itself and to the Circumscription or Distinction of
its different Parts,” he writes:

Now, if extent is only the continuity of foreign resistance to a desired

effort, could we not also consider the original perception of the kind of
inner extent that constitutes the body itself as contained in the funda-
mental and continuous feeling of the resistance or inertia that the organs
offer to the same individual force that tends to move them?58

Within the same paragraph, Biran stresses that the individual relates the affec-
tive modifications of its interior space (sensation via inner touch) to the exte-
rior space as a place of objects, respectively non-affective modes, e.g. colors or
figures (perception). Knowledge of existence, he concludes, is constituted by
sensation and perception, two physiological processes that ought to be funda-

57 Maine de Biran, Of Immediate Apperception, 132; De l’aperception immédiate, 157. Biran:

“L’aperception interne immédiate, qui renferme le sentiment de la coexistence de notre
corps, et l’aperception externe encore immédiate, qui nos fait croire plutôt que sentir une
existence étrangèr, se rallient donc, et coïncident (eu égard à la ordre du temps) avec
l’exercise primordial de la même force vivante. Cet exercise est-il libre et immédiatement
aperceptible dans la résistance organique? C’est le moi et son corps, objet de l’apercep-
tion immédiate interne. / Est-il constraint par un obstacle fixe? C’est encore moi et le corps
étranger, objet de l’aperception mediate externe, où la résistance absolue de la matière
obscurcit, dans la conscience, celle propre et relative des organes obéissant à la même
volonté.”
58 Maine de Biran, De l’aperception immédiate, 125. Biran (§ 5): “Or, si l’étendue n’est que la
continuité de résistance étrangère à un effort voulu, ne pourrait-on pas considérer aussi
la perception originaire de l’espèce d’éntendue intérieure qui constitue le corps propre
comme renfermé[e] dans le sentiment fundamental et continu de la résistance ou de
l’inertie que les organes offrent à la même force individuelle qui tend à les mouvoir?”
introduction 21

mentally distinguished to provide transparency, in order to demonstrate how

both interact in the process of shaping consciousness.
Maine de Biran was awarded a medal for the second prize by the commit-
tee of the Berlin Academy, and it still offered to publish the manuscript, which
he nonetheless rejected. The originality of his hypothesis, though, was not for-
gotten. In 1812, Biran was elected as a corresponding member of the Prussian
Academy of Sciences.59
To thoroughly investigate the psycho-physiological issues involved in le tact
intérieur (“the inner touch”), in contrast to the outer touch, on a broader, trans-
disciplinary discursive basis, destined to liberate himself temporarily from
his voluntary exile in Grateloup and from his exposure to the Parisian socio-
political stage, Biran founded discussion circles. A year prior to his latest trea-
tise, in 1806, he had established the Société Médicale de Bergerac, a forum com-
posed of practicing physicians, pharmacists (mostly chemists), and state repre-
sentatives responsible for public healthcare.60 Determining the very nature of
will (volonté) implied locating, with relative exactitude, its borderline between
conscious and unconscious states. Biran modeled his tandem concept of effort
and corporeal résistance in its immediate impact upon the human self after
Leibniz’s claim of a reciprocity between body and soul in the preface of the
New Essays on Human Understanding (written 1704; printed 1765), in which
the German philosopher had specified John Locke’s notion of habitual per-
ception. Following his inaugural lecture held exactly one year after the foun-
dation of the society, on November 15th 1807, Biran delivered a talk entitled
“Memory on obscure Perceptions or on general emotional Impressions and
Sympathies in particular,”61 in which he revisited what he considered to pose a
terminological challenge to the subject-specificity of the insubstantial, though
powerful unconscious that Leibniz had introduced in his essay: the distinc-
tion between perceptions insensibles (the active modus operandi of unnotice-

59 According to the membership-register of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der

Wissenschaften: https://www.bbaw.de/die‑akademie/akademie‑historische‑aspekte/mit-
glieder‑historisch/historisches‑mitglied‑francois‑pierre‑gonthier‑maine‑de‑biran‑1735.
60 Pierre Lemay, Maine de Biran et la Société Médicale de Bergerac: d’après le registre des
séances et les rapports inédits. Paris: Vigot Frères, Éditeurs, 1936; Paul Marx, “Maine de Biran
(1766–1824), fondateur de la Société Médicale de Bergerac.”Histoire des Sciences Médicales,
Tome xxxii, no. 4 (1998): 385–388.
61 Maine de Biran, “Mémoire sur les perceptions obscures ou sur les impressions générales
affectives et les sympathies en particulier lu a la Société Médicale de Bergerac [Le 15
Novembre 1807],” Discours à la Société Médicale de Bergerac, édité par François Azouvi,
coll. Œuvres de Maine de Biran (tome v), publiées sous la direction de François Azouvi,
Paris: J. Vrin, 1984, 10–43.
22 introduction

able and therefore obscure perceptions) and petite perceptions (accumulatively

minute perceptions—so low in strength that these are, marginally situated,
beneath the brink of awareness).62 Adjusting the terminology to his concept of
a dynamic self, Biran substituted Leibniz’s terms by one that more adequately
reflected a passive mode of (external and internal) impressions affectives. Addi-
tionally, he ascribed, through this exemplifying appropriation, key importance
to the challenge of an adequate medical language and terminology that would
eventually permit the precise analysis and definition of these subconscious
processual states.
In the first article of his talk, he relates these affective impressions to all of
the human senses;63 in the second article, he proceeds to an analysis of the
internal affective impressions, by exemplifying these with the existence of a
fetus, in states of sleep and delirium, and during related conditions in which
the will is suspended.64
Reciprocity between vita activa and vita contemplativa in general, but also
that of Maine de Biran himself, as a theorizing philosopher and practicing
politician, appears to be delicately balanced in this talk, as it demonstrates
that there is a progressive (stabilizing) socio-psychological function of physio-
spiritualism. Due to the experiences of the French Revolution and its repercus-
sions, Biran had developed a sensitive eye for human interaction and behavior
patterns. Upon a comparison between the properties of the external emotional
impressions with those of the internal emotional impressions in article one
and two, the third article “Relations of the Affections with the Will” stringently
explores the ramifications for the moral sympathies in its first section and for
the social passions in its second section.65
In 1808, Maine de Biran shared his “Observations on the Organic Functions
of the Brain, considered as seats of the different intellectual and moral facul-
ties” with his audience. He aimed at a repudiation of a doctrine about the local-
ization of brain functions that Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim
had presented in March 1808 to members of the Institute de France. Arguing

62 Gotthold Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, edited and translated
by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
54–56.
63 Maine de Biran, “Impressions affectives extérieurs,” “Mémoire sur les perceptions ob-
scures,” 13–22.
64 Maine de Biran, “Impressions affectives interns,” “Mémoire sur les perceptions obscures,”
23–35.
65 Maine de Biran, “Rapports des affections avec la volonté. Sympathis morales / Rapports
des affections avec les passions sociales,” “Mémoire sur les perceptions obscures,” 36–43.
introduction 23

against it, the philosopher from Bergerac suggested instead the inextricable
relatedness between physiology and psychology.66
Following up in his second talk that he delivered on the nineteenth of
November 1809 to the Medical Society, “New considerations on sleep, dreams
and somnambulism”67 on article two of his previous lecture, Biran explained
in its second chapter, “Of the faculties that remain in sleep, and of dreams:”

The existence of two principles of movement and action, to which man is

subjected within the succession of phenomena which constitutes wake-
fulness, especially the opposition and the kind of antagonism which
reigns between these two principles is clearly manifested in those states of
struggle in which an appetite, an affection, an imperious passion is at odds
with a powerful and energetic will that tends to repress these impulses.
If this latter power has the upper hand, the sudden, tumultuous, irreg-
ular movements are stopped, modified or changed in the very principle
of their determination; they submit to the power of another force, which
imprints on them an entirely new character.68

In conclusion, Maine de Biran concentrated in his two treatises mainly on the

existential field of tension between the suspension of will and the repression
of affections. Only late in his work, in 1817, would he return to these topics

66 Maine de Biran, “Observations sur les divisions organiques du cerveau considérées comme
sièges des différentes facultés intellectuelles et morales; des Rapports qu’on peut établir
entre cette sorte de division et l’analyse des facultés de l’entendement: examen du système
du doct[eu]r Gall a ce sujet,” Discours à la Société Médicale de Bergerac, 47–81. See Marco
Piazza, “Maine de Biran and Gall’s phrenology: the origins of a debate about the local-
ization of mental faculties,” French Spiritualism in the Nineteenth Century (Special Issue),
British Journal for the History of Philosophy Vol. 28/5 2020, 866–884.
67 Maine de Biran, “Nouvelles considérations sur le sommeil, les songes, et le somnambu-
lisme,” Discours à la Société Médicale de Bergerac, 82–123.
68 Maine de Biran, “Des facultés qui subsistent dans le sommeil, et des songes,” Discours à
la Société Médicale de Bergerac, 94. Biran: “L’existence de deux principes de movement
et d’action, auxquels l’homme est soumis dans la succession des phénomènes qui con-
stitue la veille, surtout l’opposition et l’espèce d’antagonisme qui règne entre ses deux
principes, se manifeste[nt] bien clairement dans ces états de lute où un appétit, une affec-
tion, une passion entrainante est aux prises avec une volonté forte et énergique qui tend
à réprimer son impulsion.” [Biran wrote at the margin: “Tant que cette volonté subsiste.” Il
n’a pas barré ce début, mais il a ajouté en marge: “Si cette puissance règne.”] Si cette puis-
sance règne, les mouvements brusques, tumultueux, irréguliers sont arrêtés, modifies ou
changés dans le principe même de leur détermination, et passent sous l’empire d’une autre
[“puissance”] force qui leur imprime en caractère tout nouveaux.” [Comments in brackets
here by Azouvi.]
24 introduction

in an essay that he composed for Michaud’s Biographie universelle ancienne

et moderne with his friend Philipp Albert Stapfer, Exposition de la doctrine
philosophique de Leibniz (Commentary on the Philosophical Doctrine of Leib-
niz),69 which, published in 1819, proved to be the last of his works printed during
his lifetime.
His Société Médical de Bergerac, however, one of the first of its kind in France,
was short-lived. Maine de Biran’s efforts to sustain the society are documented
in his last address to its members, on 15 April 1810, Speech to the Medical Society
of Bergerac, with the aim of reviving this decadent society, to give it more consis-
tency and activity, to coordinate and regularize its work, to bring it back to more
fixed objects, better determined and of more immediate utility.70 After less than
four years and a total of approximately ten sessions, the society had to suspend
its activities for lack of members and communication.71
Beyond the boundaries of his native Bergerac, he aimed, especially in Paris,
through his literary social activities at inspiring philosophical discourse across
a multidisciplinary academic community, intertwined with political circles.
With this carefully woven network of thinkers he hoped to eventually buttress
his project for a novel anthropology. Originally thinking of it as a positivist
spiritualism emerging from the medical disciplines, he would deploy experi-
mental psychology as one of its most efficient instruments in what was to be
the foundation of a new science of man. The execution of this elaborate plan
encompasses the very core of Maine de Biran’s philosophy of will, the lectures
that he delivered in Bergerac, his response to another competition organized
by the Copenhagen Academy (1810–1812) and an Essay on the Foundations of
Psychology that he would begin in 1811.
As mentioned before, Biran had combined and synthesized his new ideas
developed in two consecutive essays, Of Immediate Apperception (1807) and On
the Division of Thinking (1805). These two essays, in turn, found entry, together
with the thoughts that he had recently developed in his Bergerac lectures,72

69 Maine de Biran, Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibnitz, Paris: Michaud, 1819,

1–31.
70 Maine de Biran, “Discours à la Société Médicale de Bergerac, dans le but de remonter cette
société en décadence, lui donner plus de consistance et d’activité, coordonner et régu-
lariser ses travaux, les ramener a des objets plus fixes, mieux déterminés et d’une utilité
plus immédiate,” in François Azouvi, Maine de Biran, Discours à la Société Médicale de
Bergerac, édité par François Azouvi, coll. Œuvres de Maine de Biran (tome v), publiées
sous la direction de François Azouvi, Paris: J. Vrin, 1984, 124–128.
71 François Azouvi, Introduction to Maine de Biran, Discours a la Société Médicale de Berg-
erac, 1984, viii.
72 Detailing the complex philological and editorial history in terms of textual organic struc-
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Returning to the plans—they seemed to have a fascination for Mills
—one of his questions prompted Bruce to seize a pencil and try
another type of entrance. Mills stood by, watching the free swift
movement of the strong hand.
“I’m not so sure that’s better than your first idea. I’ve always heard
that a first inspiration is likely to be the best—providing always that it
is an inspiration! I’d give a lot if I could do what you’ve just done with
that pencil. I suppose it’s a knack; you’re born with it. You probably
began young; such talent shows itself early.”
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t like to fool with a pencil. My
mother gave me my first lessons. She had a very pretty talent—
sketched well and did water colors—very nice ones, too. That’s one
of them over there—a corner of our garden in the old home at
Laconia.”
Mills walked slowly across the room to look at a framed water color
that hung over Bruce’s writing table.
“Yes; I can see that it’s good work. I remember that garden—I seem
to remember this same line of hollyhocks against the brick wall.”
“Oh, mother had that every year! Her flowers were famous in
Laconia.”
“And that sun-dial—I seem to remember that, too,” Mills observed
meditatively.
“Mother liked that sort of thing. We used to sit out there in the
summer. She made a little festival of the coming of spring. I think all
the birds in creation knew her as friend. And the neighbor children
came in to hear her read—fairy stories and poetry. We had jolly good
times there—mother and I!”
“I’m sure you did,” said Mills gravely.
As he stepped away from the table his eyes fell upon the photograph
of a young woman in a silver frame. He bent down for a closer
inspection. Bruce turned away, walked the length of the room and
glanced round to find Mills still regarding the photograph.
“My mother, as she was at about thirty,” Bruce remarked.
“Yes; I thought so. Somewhat older than when I knew her, but the
look of youth is still there.”
“I prefer that to any other picture of her I have. She refused to be
photographed in her later years—said she didn’t want me to think of
her as old. And she never was that—could never have been.”
“I can well believe it,” said Mills softly. “Time deals gently with spirits
like hers.”
“No one was ever like her,” said Bruce with feeling. “She made the
world a kindlier and nobler place by living in it.”
“And you’re loyal to the ideal she set for you! You think of her, I’m
sure, in all you do—in all you mean to do.”
“Yes, it helps—it helps a lot to feel that somewhere she knows and
cares.”
Mills picked up a book, scanned the title page unseeingly and threw
it down.
“I’ve just about killed an evening for you,” he said with a smile and
put out his hand cordially. “My chauffeur is probably frozen.”
“You’ve been a big help!” replied Bruce. “It’s been fine to have you
here. I’ll see Mr. Freeman tomorrow and go over the whole thing
again. He may be able to squeeze the fountain out of the
appropriation! May I tell him it’s your idea?”
“Oh, no! No, indeed! Just let my meddlesomeness be a little joke
between us. I shall be leaving town shortly and may not see you
again for several months. So good-bye and good luck!”
Bruce walked downstairs with him. At the entrance they again shook
hands, as if the good will on both sides demanded this further
expression of amity.

III
A brief item in the “Personal and Society” column of an afternoon
newspaper apprised Bruce a few days later of the departure of Mr.
Franklin Mills and Miss Leila Mills for the Mediterranean, they having
abandoned their proposed trip to Bermuda for the longer voyage.
Bruce wondered a little at the change of plans, suspecting that it
might in some degree be a disciplinary measure for Leila’s benefit, a
scheme for keeping her longer under her father’s eye. He
experienced a curious new loneliness at the thought of their absence
and then was impatient to find himself giving them a second thought.
A month earlier he would have been relieved by the knowledge that
Mills was gone and that the wide seas rolled between them. An
amazing thing, this! To say they were nothing to him did not help now
as in those first months after he had established himself in Mills’s
town. They meant a good deal to him and perhaps he meant
something to them. It was very odd indeed how he and the Millses
circled about each other.
As he put down the newspaper a note was brought to him at his
apartment by Mills’s chauffeur. It read:
Dear Bruce: You said I might; I can’t just Mr. Storrs you!
Trunks at the station and Dada waiting at the front door. I
couldn’t bear the idea of writing you a note you’d read
while I was still in town—so please consider that I’m
throwing you a kiss from the tail end of the observation
car. I could never, never have had the courage to say my
thanks to you—if I tried I’d cry and make a general mess
of it. But—I want you to know that I do appreciate it—what
you did—in saving my life and every little thing! I’d
probably have died all right enough in the frightful cold if
you hadn’t found me. I really didn’t know till yesterday,
when I wormed it out of Dada, just how it all happened! I’m
simply crushed! I promise I’ll never do such a thing again.
Thank you loads, and be sure I’ll never forget. I wish you
were my big brother; I’d just adore being a nice, good little
sister to you. Love and kisses, from
Leila.
He reread it a dozen times in the course of the evening. It was so
like the child—the perverse, affectionate child—that Leila was. “I
wish you were my big brother.” The sentence had slipped from her
flying pen thoughtlessly, no doubt, but it gave Bruce a twinge. Shep
did not know; Leila did not know! and yet for both of these children of
Franklin Mills he felt a fondness that was beyond ordinary friendship.
Shep could never be, in the highest sense, a companion of his
father; Mills no doubt loved Leila, but he loved her without
understanding. Her warm, passionate heart, the very fact that she
and Shep were the children of Franklin Mills made life difficult for
them. Either would have been happier if they had not been born into
the Mills caste. The Mills money and the Mills position were an
encumbrance against which more or less consciously they were in
rebellion.
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I
It was ten days later that a communication from the Laconia War
Memorial Association gave warning that the stipulations for the
contesting architects were being altered, and in another week Bruce
received the supplemental data sent out to all the contestants. The
amount to be expended had been increased by an unexpected
addition to the private subscriptions.
In one of his first fits of homesickness Bruce had subscribed for the
Laconia Examiner to keep in touch with affairs in his native town.
The paper printed with a proud flourish the news of the augmentation
of the fund. One hundred thousand dollars had been contributed
through a New York trust company by “a citizen” whose identity for
good and sufficient reasons was not to be disclosed. The trust
company’s letter as quoted in the Examiner recited that the donation
was from a “patriotic American who, recognizing the fine spirit in
which Laconia had undertaken the memorial and the community’s
desire that it should be an adequate testimony to the valor and
sacrifice of American youth, considered it a high privilege to be
permitted to assist.”
Mills! Though the Laconia newspaper was evidently wholly at sea as
to the identity of the contributor, Bruce was satisfied that Mills was
the unknown donor. And he resented it. The agreeable impression
left by Mills the evening they discussed the plans was dispelled by
this unwarranted interference. Bruce bitterly regretted having taken
Mills into his confidence. Mills’s interest had pleased him, but he had
never dreamed that the man might feel moved to add to the
attractiveness of the contest by a secret contribution to the fund. He
felt strongly moved to abandon the whole thing and but for the
embarrassment of explaining himself to Freeman he would have
done so. But the artist in him prevailed. Mills had greatly broadened
the possibilities of the contest and in a few days Bruce fell to work
with renewed enthusiasm.
He was living in Laconia again, so engrossed did he become in his
work. He dined with Carroll now and then, enjoyed long evenings at
the Freemans’ and kept touch with the Hendersons; but he refused
so many invitations to the winter functions that Dale protested. He
dropped into the Central States Trust Company now and then to
observe Shep in his new rôle of vice-president. Shep was happier in
the position than he had expected to be. Carroll was seeing to it that
he had real work to do, work that was well within his powers. He had
charge of the savings department and was pleased when his old
friends among the employees of the battery plant looked him up and
opened accounts. The friends of the Mills family, where they took
note of Shep’s transfer at all, saw in it a promotion.
Bruce, specially importuned by telephone, went to one of
Constance’s days at home, which drew a large attendance by
reason of the promised presence of an English novelist whose
recent severe criticism of American society and manners had made
him the object of particular adoration to American women readers.
Bud Henderson, who had carried a flask to the tea, went about
protesting against the consideration shown the visitor. If, he said, an
American writer criticized American women in any such fashion he
would be lynched, but let an Englishman do it and women would
steal the money out of their children’s banks to buy his books and
lecture tickets. So spake Bud. If Bud had had two flasks he would
have broken up the tea; restricted as he was, his protest against the
Briton took the form of an utterly uncalled for attack upon the drama
league delivered to an aunt of Maybelle’s who was president of the
local society—a strong Volsteadian who thought Bud vulgar, which at
times Bud, by any high social standard, indubitably was. However, if
amid so many genuflections the eminent Briton was disturbed by
Bud’s evil manners or criticisms, Bud possibly soothed his feelings
by following him upstairs when the party was dispersing and
demonstrating the manner in which American law is respected by
drawing flasks from nine out of fifteen overcoats laid out on
Constance’s guest room bed and pouring half a pint of excellent
bourbon into the unresisting man of letters.
This function was only an interlude in the city’s rather arid social
waste. The local society, Bruce found, was an affair of curiously
close groupings. The women of the ancestral crowd were so wary of
the women who had floated in on the tide of industrial expansion that
one might have thought the newcomers were, in spite of their
prosperity, afflicted with leprosy....
While Bruce might bury himself from the sight of others who had
manifested a friendly interest in him, Helen Torrence was not so
easily denied. She had no intention of going alone to the February
play of the Dramatic Club. She telephoned Bruce to this effect and
added that he must dine with her that evening and take her to the
club. Bud had already sent him an admission card with a warning not
to come if anything better offered, such as sitting up with a corpse—
this being Bud’s manner of speaking of the organization whose
politics he dominated and whose entertainments he would not have
missed for a chance to dine with royalty.
Bruce, having reached the Torrence house, found Millicent there.
“You see what you get for being good!” cried Helen, noting the
surprise and pleasure in Bruce’s face as he appeared in her drawing
room.
“I thought you’d probably run when you saw me,” said Millicent. “You
passed me at the post office door yesterday and looked straight over
my head. I never felt so small in my life.”
“Post office?” Bruce repeated. “I haven’t been near the place for
weeks!”
“That will do from you!” warned Helen. “We all thought you’d be a
real addition to our sad social efforts here, but it’s evident you don’t
like us. It’s very discouraging. You were at Connie’s, though, to hear
her lion roar. I saw you across the room. Connie always gets the
men! Your friend Bud insulted everybody there; I see him selling any
more Plantagenets!”
“Bud’s patriotism leads him astray sometimes; that’s all. Any more
scolding, Millicent?” Bruce asked. “Let me see—we had arrived at
the stage of first names, hadn’t we?”
“Yes, Bruce! But after the long separation it might be as well to go
back to the beginning. As for scolding, let’s consider that we’ve
signed an armistice.”
“I don’t like the military lingo; it sounds as though there had been war
between us.”
“Dear me!” Helen interposed mournfully. “You’re not going to spend
the whole evening in preliminaries! Let’s go out to dinner.”
After they were seated Bruce was still rather more self-conscious
than was comfortable. Nothing had happened; or more truthfully,
nothing had happened except that he had been keeping away from
Millicent because of Franklin Mills. She evidently was not displeased
to see him again. He had not realized how greatly he had missed her
till her voice touched chords that had vibrated at their first meeting.
Her eyes had the same steady light and kindled responsively to any
demand of mirth; her hair had the same glint of gold. He marveled
anew at her poise and ease. Tonight her gown, of a delicate shade of
crimson, seemed a subdued reflection of her bright coloring. He
floundered badly in his attempts to bring some spirit to the
conversation. It seemed stupid to ask Millicent about her music or
inquire how her modeling was coming on or what she had been
reading. He listened with forced attention while she and Helen
compared notes on recent social affairs in which they had
participated.
“Millie, you don’t really like going about—teas and that sort of thing,”
said Helen. “I know you don’t. All you girls who have ideas are like
that.”
“Ideas! Dearest Helen, are you as easily deceived as that!
Sometimes there are things I’d rather do than go to parties! Does
one really have to keep going to avoid seeming queer?”
“I go because I haven’t the brains to do anything else. I like
wandering with the herd. It just thrills me to get into a big jam. And I
suppose I show myself whenever I’m asked for fear I’ll be forgotten!”
“My sole test of a social function is whether they feed me standing or
sitting,” said Bruce when appealed to. “I can bear anything but that
hideous sensation that my plate is dripping.”
“That’s why men hate teas,” observed Helen. “It’s because of the silly
refreshments no one wants and everybody must have or the hostess
is broken-hearted.”
“That’s probably where jailers got the idea of forcible feeding,”
Millicent suggested.
“At the Hendersons’,” Bruce added, “only the drinks are compulsory.
Bud’s social symbol is the cocktail-shaker!”
“Everybody drinks too much;” said Helen, “except us. Bruce, help
yourself to the sherry.”
“What is a perfect social occasion?” Bruce asked. “My own ideas are
a little muddled, but you—Helen?”
“If you must know the truth—there is no such thing! However, you
might ask Millicent; she’s an optimist.”
“A perfect time is sitting in the middle of the floor in my room cutting
paper dolls,” Millicent answered. “I’m crazy about it. Leila says it’s
the best thing I do.”
“Do you ever exhibit your creations?” asked Bruce solicitously.
“We’ve got her in a trap now,” exclaimed Helen. “Millie takes her
paper dolls to the sick children in the hospitals. I know, because the
children told me. I was at the City Hospital the other day and peeped
into the children’s ward. Much excitement—a vast population of
paper dolls dressed in the latest modes. The youngsters were so
tickled! They said a beautiful lady had brought them—a most
wonderful, beautiful lady. And she was going to come back with
paper and scissors and show them just how they were made!”
“They’re such dear, patient little angels,” murmured Millicent. “You
feel better about all humanity when you see how much courage
there is in the world. It’s a pretty brave old world after all.”
“It’s the most amazing thing about life,” said Bruce, “that so many
millions rise up every morning bent on doing their best. You’d think
the whole human race would have given up the struggle long ago
and jumped into the sea. But no! Poor boobs that we are, we go
whistling right along. Frankly, I mean to hang on a couple of weeks
longer. Silly old world—but—it has its good points.”
“Great applause!” exclaimed Helen, satisfied now that her little party
was not to prove an utter failure. These were two interesting young
people, she knew, and she was anxious to hear their views on
matters about which she troubled herself more than most people
suspected.
“I’ve wondered sometimes,” Millicent said, “what would happen if the
world could be made altogether happy just once by a miracle of
some kind, no heartache anywhere; no discomfort! How long would it
last?”
“Only till some person among the millions wanted something another
one had; that would start the old row over again,” Bruce answered.
“I see what you children mean,” said Helen seriously. “Selfishness is
what makes the world unhappy!”
“Now—we’re getting in deep!” Bruce exclaimed. “Millicent always
swims for the open water.”
“Millie ought to go about lecturing; telling people to be calm, to look
more at the stars and less at their neighbors’ new automobiles. I
believe that would do a lot of good,” said Helen.
“A splendid idea!” Bruce declared, laughing into Millicent’s eyes. “But
what a sacrifice of herself! A wonderful exhibition of unselfishness,
but——”
“I’d be stoned to death!”
“You’d be surer of martyrdom if you told them to love their neighbors
as themselves,” said Helen. “Seriously now, that’s the hardest thing
there is to do! Love my neighbor as myself! Me! Why, on one side
my neighbor’s children snowball my windows; on the other side
there’s a chimney that ruins me paying cleaner’s bills. Perhaps you’d
speak to them for me, Millie?”
“See here!” exclaimed Millicent. “Where do you get this idea of using
me as a missionary and policeman! I don’t feel any urge to reform
the world! I’m awful busy tending to my own business.”
“Oh, all right,” said Bruce with a sigh of resignation. “Let the world go
hang, then, if you won’t save it!”
Helen was dressing the salad, and Bruce was free to watch
Millicent’s eyes as they filled with dreams. As at other times when
some grave mood touched her, it seemed that she became another
being, exploring some realm alien to common experience. He
glanced at her hands, folded quietly on the edge of the table, and
again at her dream-filled eyes. Hers was the repose of a nature
schooled in serenity. The world might rage in fury about her, but
amid the tempest her soul would remain unshaken....
Helen, to whom silence was always disturbing, looked up, but stifled
an apology for the unconscionable time she was taking with the
salad when she saw Millicent’s face, and Bruce’s intent, reverent
gaze fixed upon the girl.
“Saving the world!” Millicent repeated deliberatingly. “I never quite
like the idea. It rather suggests—doesn’t it?—that some new
machinery or method must be devised for saving it. But the secret
came into the world ever so long ago—it was the ideal of beauty. A
Beautiful Being died that man might know the secret of happiness. It
had to be that way or man would never have understood or
remembered. It’s not His fault that his ideas have been so confused
and obscured in the centuries that have passed since He came. It’s
man’s fault. The very simplicity of His example has always
bewildered man; it was too good to be true!”
“But, Millie,” said Helen with a little embarrassed laugh, “does the
world really want to live as Jesus lived? Or would it admire people
who did? Somebody said once that Christianity isn’t a failure
because it’s never been tried. Will it ever be tried—does anyone care
enough?”
“Dear me! What have I gotten into?” Millicent picked up her fork and
glanced at them smilingly. “Bruce, don’t look so terribly solemn! Why,
people are trying it every day, at least pecking at it a little. I’ve caught
you at it lots of times! While we sit here, enjoying this quite wonderful
salad, scores of people are doing things to make the world a better
place to live in—safer, kinder and happier. I saw a child walk out of
the hospital the other day who’d been carried in, a pitiful little cripple.
It was a miracle; and if you’d seen the child’s delight and the look in
the face of the doctor whose genius did the work, you’d have thought
the secret of Jesus is making some headway!”
“And knowing the very charming young woman named Millicent who
found that little crippled girl and took her to the hospital. I’d have
thought a lot more things!”
“I never did it!” Millicent cried.
“She’s always up to such tricks!” Helen informed Bruce. “Paper dolls
are only one item of Millie’s good works.”
“Be careful!” Millicent admonished. “I could tell some stories on you
that might embarrass you terribly.” She turned to Bruce with a lifting
of the brows that implied their hostess’s many shameless excursions
in philanthropy.
“How grand it would be if we could all talk about serious things—life,
religion and things like that—as Millie does,” remarked Helen. “Most
people talk of religion as though it were something disgraceful.”
“Or they take the professional tone of the undertaker telling a late
pallbearer where to sit,” Bruce added, “and the pallbearer is always
deaf and insists on getting into the wrong place and sitting on
someone’s hat.”
“How jolly! Anything to cheer up a funeral,” said Helen. “Go on,
Millie, and talk some more. You’re a lot more comforting than Doctor
Lindley.”
“The Doctor’s fine,” said Millicent spiritedly. “I don’t go to church
because half of me is heathen, I suppose.” She paused as though a
little startled by the confession. “There are things about churches—
some of the hymns, the creed, the attempts to explain the Scriptures
—that don’t need explaining—that rub me the wrong way. But it isn’t
fair to criticize Doctor Lindley or any other minister who’s doing the
best he can to help the world when the times are against him. No
one has a harder job than a Christian minister of his training and
traditions who really knows what’s the trouble with the world and the
church but is in danger of being burned as a heretic if he says what
he thinks.”
“People can’t believe any more, can they, what their grandfathers
believed? It’s impossible—with science and everything,” suggested
Helen vaguely.
“Why should they?” asked Millicent. “I liked to believe that God
moves forward with the world. He has outgrown His own churches;
it’s their misfortune that they don’t realize it. And Jesus, the Beautiful
One, walks through the modern world weighted down with a heavier
cross than the one he died on—bigotry, intolerance, hatred—what a
cruel thing that men should hate one another in His name! I’ve
wondered sometimes what Jesus must think of all the books that
have been written to explain Him—mountains of books! Jesus is the
only teacher the world ever had who got His whole story into one
word—a universal word, an easy word to say, and the word that has
inspired all the finest deeds of man. He rested His case on that,
thinking that anything so simple would never be misunderstood. At
the hospital one day I heard a mother say to her child, a pitiful little
scrap who was doomed to die, ‘I love you so!’ and the wise,
understanding little baby said, ‘Me know you do.’ I think that’s an
answer to the charge that Christianity is passing out. It can’t, you
see, because it’s founded on the one thing in the world that can
never die.”
The room was very still. The maid, who had been arrested in the
serving of the dinner by a gesture from Helen, furtively made the
sign of the cross. The candle flames bent to some imperceptible
stirring of the quiet air. Bruce experienced a sense of vastness, of
the immeasurable horizons of Millicent’s God and a world through
which the Beautiful One wandered still, symbolizing the ineffable
word of His gospel that was not for one people, or one sect, not to be
bound up into one creed, but written into the hearts of all men as
their guide to happiness. It seemed to him that the girl’s words were
part of some rite of purification that had cleansed and blessed the
world.
“I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way,” said Bruce thoughtfully.
Helen was a wise woman and knew the perils of anticlimax. She
turned and nodded to the maid.
“Please forgive me! I’ve been holding back the dinner!” Millicent
exclaimed. “You must always stop me when I begin riding the clouds.
Bruce, are you seeing Dale Freeman these days? Of course you are!
Helen, we must study Dale more closely. She knows how to bring
Bruce running!”
“I cheerfully yield to Dale in everything,” said Helen. “I must watch
the time. They promise an unusually good show tonight—three one-
act pieces and one of them by George Whitford; he and Connie are
to act in it.”
“Connie ought to be a star,” Millicent remarked, “she gives a lot of
time to theatricals.”
“There’s just a question whether Connie and George Whitford are
not—well, getting up theatricals does make for intimacy!” said Helen.
“I wish George had less money! An idle man—particularly a
fascinating devil like George—is a dangerous playmate for a woman
like Connie!”
“Oh, but Connie’s a dear!” exclaimed Millicent defensively. “Her
position isn’t easy. A lot of the criticism you hear of her is unjust.”
“A lot of the criticism you hear of everybody is unjust,” Bruce
ventured.
“Oh, we have a few people here who pass for respectable but start
all the malicious gossip in town,” Helen observed. “They’re not all
women, either! I suspect Mort Walters of spreading the story that
Connie and George are having a big affair, and that Mr. Mills gave
Connie a good combing about it before he went abroad!”
“Ridiculous!” murmured Millicent.
“Of course,” Helen went on. “We all know why Leila’s father dragged
her away. But Connie ought really to have a care. It’s too bad Shep
isn’t big enough to give Walters a thrashing. The trouble with Walters
is that he tried to start a little affair with Connie himself and she
turned him down cold. Pardon me, are we gossiping?”
“Of course not!” laughed Millicent.
“Just whetting our appetites for anything new that offers at the club,”
said Bruce. “I’m glad I’m a new man in town; I can listen to all the
scandal without being obliged to take sides.”
“Millie! You hate gossip,” said Helen, “so please talk about the saints
so I won’t have a chance to chatter about the sinners.”
“Don’t worry,” said Bruce. “If there were no sinners the saints
wouldn’t know how good they are!”
“We’d better quit on that,” said Helen. “It’s time to go!”

II
At the hall where the Dramatic Club’s entertainments were given
they met Shepherd Mills, who confessed that he had been holding
four seats in the hope that they’d have pity on him and not let him sit
alone.
“I’ve hardly seen Connie for a week,” he said. “This thing of having a
wife on the stage is certainly hard on the husband!”
The room was filled to capacity and there were many out of town
guests, whom Shep named proudly as though their presence were
attributable to the fact that Connie was on the program.
Whitford, in his ample leisure, had been putting new spirit into the
club, and the first two of the one-act plays that constituted the bill
disclosed new talent and were given with precision and finish. Chief
interest, however, lay in the third item of the bill, a short poetic drama
written by Whitford himself. The scene, revealed as the curtain rose,
was of Whitford’s own designing—the battlements of a feudal castle,
with a tower rising against a sweep of blue sky. The set transcended
anything that the club had seen in its long history and was greeted
with a quick outburst of applause. Whitford’s name passed over the
room, it seemed, in a single admiring whisper. George was a genius;
the town had never possessed anyone comparable to George
Whitford, who distinguished himself alike in war and in the arts of
peace and could afford to spend money with a free hand on amateur
theatricals.
His piece, “The Beggar,” written in blank verse, was dated vaguely in
the Middle Ages and the device was one of the oldest known to
romance. A lord of high degree is experiencing the time-honored
difficulty in persuading his daughter of the desirability of marriage
with a noble young knight whose suit she has steadfastly scorned.
The castle is threatened; the knight’s assistance is imperatively
needed; and the arrival of messengers, the anxious concern of the
servitors, induce at once an air of tensity.
In the fading afternoon light Constance Mills, as the princess, who
has been wandering in the gardens, makes her entrance
unconcernedly and greets her distracted lover with light-hearted
indifference. She begins recounting a meeting with a beggar minstrel
who has beguiled her with his music. She provokingly insists upon
singing snatches of his songs to the irritated knight, who grows
increasingly uneasy over the danger to the beleagured castle. As the
princess exits the beggar appears and engages the knight in a
colloquy, witty and good-humored on the vagrant’s part, but marked
by the knight’s mounting anger. Whitford, handsome, jaunty,
assured, even in his rags, with his shrewd retorts evokes continuous
laughter.
A renewed alarm calls the knight away, leaving the beggar
thrumming his lute. The princess reappears to the dimming of lights
and the twinkle in the blue background of the first tremulous star.
The beggar, who of course is the enemy prince in disguise, springs
forward as she slips out of her cloak and stands forth in a flowing
robe in shimmering white. Her interchange with the beggar passes
swiftly from surprise, indifference, scorn, to awakened interest and
encouragement.
No theatre was ever stilled to an intenser silence. The audacity of it,
the folly of it! The pictorial beauty of the scene, any merit it
possessed as drama, were lost in the fact that George Whitford was
making love to Constance Mills. No make-believe could have
simulated the passion of his wooing in the lines that he had written
for himself, and no response could have been informed with more
tenderness and charm than Constance brought to her part.
Whitford was declaiming:
“My flower! My light, my life! I offer thee
Not jingling coin, nor lands, nor palaces,
But yonder stars, and the young moon of spring,
And rosy dawns and purple twilights long;
All singing streams, and their great lord the sea—
With these I’d thee endow.”
And Constance, slowly lifting her head, an enthralling picture of
young trusting love, replied:
“I am a beggar in my heart!
My soul hath need of thee! Teach me thy ways,
And make me partner in thy wanderings,
And lead me to the silver springs of song,
I would be free as thou art, roam the world,
Away from clanging war, by murmuring streams,
Through green cool woodlands sweet with peace and love....
Wilt thou be faithful, wilt thou love me long?”
To her tremulous pleading he pledged his fealty and when he had
taken her into his arms and kissed her they exited slowly. As they
passed from sight his voice was heard singing as the curtain fell.
The entire cast paraded in response to the vociferous and long
continued applause, and Whitford and Constance bowed their
acknowledgments together and singly. Cries of “author” detained
Whitford for a speech, in which he chaffed himself and promised that
in appreciation of their forbearance in allowing him to present so
unworthy a trifle, which derived its only value from the intelligence
and talent of his associates, he would never again tax their patience.
As the lights went up Bruce, turning to his companions, saw that
Shepherd was staring at the stage as though the players were still
visible. Helen, too, noticed the tense look in Shep’s face, and
touched him lightly on the arm. He came to with a start and looked
about quickly, as if conscious that his deep preoccupation had been
observed.
“It was perfectly marvelous, Shep! Connie was never so beautiful,
and she did her part wonderfully!”
“Yes; Connie was fine! They were all splendid!” Shep stammered.
“I’ve seen her in plays before, but nothing to match tonight,” said
Helen. “You’ll share her congratulations—it’s a big night for the
family!”
They had all risen, and Millicent and Bruce added their
congratulations—Shep smiling but still a little dazed, his eyes
showing that he was thinking back—trying to remember, in the way
of one who has passed through an ordeal too swiftly for the memory
fully to record it.
“Constance was perfectly adorable!” said Millicent sincerely.
“Yes, yes!” Shep exclaimed. “I had no idea, really. She has acting
talent, hasn’t she?”
The question was not perfunctory; he was eager for their assurance
that they had been watching a clever piece of acting.
The room was being cleared for the dancing, and others near by
were expressing their admiration for his wife. Helen seized a
moment to whisper to Bruce:
“It rather knocked him. Be careful that he doesn’t run away. George
ought to be shot—Heaven knows there’s been enough talk already!”
“The only trouble is that they were a little too good, that’s all,” said
Bruce. “That oughtn’t to be a sin—when you remember what
amateur shows usually are!”
“It’s not to laugh!” Helen replied. “Shep’s terribly sensitive! He’s not
so stupid but he saw that George was enjoying himself making love
to Connie.”
“Well, who wouldn’t enjoy it!” Bruce answered.
The dancing had begun when Constance appeared on the floor. She
had achieved a triumph and it may have been that she was just a
little frightened now that it was over. As she held court near the
stage, smilingly receiving congratulations, she waved to Shep across
the crowd.
“Was I so very bad?” she asked Bruce. “I was terribly nervous for
fear I’d forget my lines.”
“But you didn’t! It was the most enthralling half hour I ever spent. I’m
proud to know you!”
“Thank you, Bruce. Do something for me. These people bore me; tell
Shep to come and dance with me. Yes—with you afterwards.”
Whether it was kindness or contrition that prompted this request did
not matter. It sufficed that Connie gave her first dance to Shep and
that they glided over the floor with every appearance of blissful
happiness. Whitford was passing about, paying particular attention to
the mothers of debutantes, quite as unconcernedly as though he had
not given the club its greatest thrill....
As this was Millicent’s first appearance since her election to the club,
her sponsors were taking care that she met such of the members as
had not previously been within her social range. Franklin Mills’s
efforts to establish the Hardens had not been unavailing. Bruce,
watching her as she danced with a succession of partners, heard an
elderly army officer asking the name of the golden-haired girl who
carried herself so superbly.
Bruce was waiting for his next dance with her and not greatly
interested in what went on about him, when Dale Freeman accosted
him.
“Just look at the girl! Seeing her dancing just like any other perfectly
healthy young being, you’d never think she had so many wonderful
things in her head and heart. Millie’s one of those people who think
with their hearts as well as their brains. When you find that
combination, sonny, you’ve got something!”
“Um—yes,” he assented glumly.
Dale looked up at him and laughed. “I’ll begin to suspect you’re in
love with her now if you act like this!”
“The suspicion does me honor!” he replied.
“Oh, I’m not going to push you! I did have some idea of helping you,
but I see it’s no use.”
“Really, none,” he answered soberly. And for a moment the old
unhappiness clutched him....
At one o’clock he left the hall with Helen and Millicent.
“I suppose the tongues will wag for a while,” Helen sighed wearily.
“But you’ve got to hand it to Constance and George! They certainly
put on a good show!”
At the Harden’s Bruce took Millicent’s key and unlocked the door.
“I’ve enjoyed this; it’s been fine,” she said and put out her hand.
“It was a pretty full evening,” he replied. “But there’s a part of it I’ve
stored away as better than the plays—even better than my dances
with you!”
“I know!” she said. “Helen’s salad!”
“Oh, better even than that! The talk at the table—your talk! I must
thank you for that!”
“Oh, please forget! I believe I’d rather you’d remember our last
dance!”
She laughed light-heartedly and the door closed.
“They’ve done it now!” exclaimed Helen as the car rolled on. “Why
will people be such fools! To think they had to go and let the whole
town into the secret!”
“Cease worrying! If they’d really cared anything for each other they
couldn’t have done it.”