41 Facts About Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin was the founder of "eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism.

Lycees being organically linked to the University of France and its Faculties since their Napoleonic institution Victor Cousin was "crowned" in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for a Latin oration he wrote which owned him a first prize at the concours general, a competition between the best pupils at lycees.

Victor Cousin was already known among his fellow students for his knowledge of Greek.

Victor Cousin wanted to lecture on philosophy and quickly obtained the position of master of conferences in the school.

Victor Cousin taught him to distinguish in all cognitions, and especially in the simplest facts of consciousness, the voluntary activity in which our personality is truly revealed.

Victor Cousin then took up the study of German, worked at Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and sought to master the Philosophy of Nature of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, which at first greatly attracted him.

Victor Cousin sympathized with the principle of faith of Jacobi, but regarded it as arbitrary so long as it was not recognized as grounded in reason.

Hegel's Encyclopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften appeared the same year, and Victor Cousin had one of the earliest copies.

Victor Cousin thought Hegel not particularly amiable, but the two became friends.

Victor Cousin adopted the views of the party known as doctrinaire, of which Royer-Collard was the philosophical leader.

Victor Cousin seems to have gone further, and to have approached the extreme Left.

The Normal School was swept away, and Victor Cousin shared the fate of Guizot, who was ejected from the chair of history.

For Victor Cousin was as eclectic in thought and habit of mind as he was in philosophical principle and system.

Victor Cousin's philosophy showed strikingly the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and its logical need of grouping details round central principles.

Victor Cousin's lectures produced more ardent disciples than those of any other contemporary professor of philosophy.

Victor Cousin continued to lecture for two and a half years after his return to the chair.

Victor Cousin was induced by the ministry of which his friend Francois Guizot was the head to become a member of the council of public instruction and counsellor of state, and in 1832 he was made a Peer of France.

Victor Cousin ceased to lecture, but retained the title of professor of philosophy.

Victor Cousin was in addition director of the Normal School and virtual head of the university, and from 1840 a member of the Academy of the Moral and Political Sciences in the Institut de France.

Also during this period Victor Cousin seems to have turned with fresh interest to those literary studies which he had abandoned for speculation under the influence of Laromiguiere and Royer-Collard.

Victor Cousin has sketched Jacqueline Pascal, Madame de Longueville, the marquise de Sable, the duchesse de Chevreuse, Madame de Hautefort.

Victor Cousin was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.

Victor Cousin published a pamphlet entitled Justice et charite, the purport of which showed the moderation of his political views.

Victor Cousin's sympathies were apparently with the monarchy, under certain constitutional safeguards.

Victor Cousin died in Cannes on 14 January 1867, in his seventy-fifth year.

Victor Cousin strongly insisted on the importance of method in philosophy.

Victor Cousin insists that this is the true method of philosophy as applied to consciousness, in which alone the facts of experience appear.

Victor Cousin is absolute substance only insofar as he is absolute cause, of philosophy and his essence lies precisely in his creative power.

Victor Cousin's action is not the result of a struggle between passion and virtue.

Victor Cousin is free in an unlimited manner the purest spontaneity in man is but the shadow of the freedom of God.

Victor Cousin was opposed to Kant in asserting that the unconditioned in the form of infinite or absolute cause is but a mere unrealizable tentative or effort on the part of and something different from a mere negation, yet not equivalent to a positive thought.

The doctrine of Victor Cousin was criticized by Sir W Hamilton in the Edinburgh Review of 1829, and it was animadverted upon about the same time by Schelling.

Victor Cousin made no reply to Hamilton's criticism beyond alleging that Hamilton's doctrine necessarily restricted human knowledge and certainty to psychology and logic, and destroyed metaphysics by introducing nescience and uncertainty into its highest sphere, theodicy.

Victor Cousin seeks to trace the steps which the reason has spontaneously and consciously, but irreflectively, followed.

When Victor Cousin thus set himself to vindicate those points by reflection, he gave up the obvious advantage of his other position that the realities in question are given us in immediate and spontaneous apprehension.

Victor Cousin was observational and generalizing rather than analytic and discriminating.

Victor Cousin left no distinctive permanent principle of philosophy, but he left very interesting psychological analyses, and several new, just, and true expositions of philosophical systems, especially that of Locke and the philosophers of Scotland.

Victor Cousin was at the same time a man of impressive power, of rare and wide culture, and of lofty aim, far above priestly conception and Philistine narrowness.

Victor Cousin was familiar with the broad lines of most systems of philosophy.

Victor Cousin's eclecticism was proof of a reverential sympathy with the struggles of human thought to attain to certainty in the highest problems of speculation.

Victor Cousin's spirit saved the youth of France from these other influences.