Anglo-French Alliance in my own person—an alliance organic in me for family and personal reasons. My wife’s family is of Southern French Huguenot stock (their name, Garrigue, is that of a mountain range in the South of France), and her ancestors went to America by way of Denmark. Besides Czech and Slovak, English and French are currently spoken by the younger members of my own family; and it is no accident that my first Czech work at Prague was an essay on Hume and Pascal. Since childhood I had grown up in spiritual association with France, beginning to learn French at the age of thirteen; and though I had little actual intercourse with French people before the war, I kept so closely in touch with their whole literature that it became to me a living thing. So thoroughly had I studied France, her literature and her culture, that I felt no need actually to visit the country. Indeed, save for one or two landings at Havre, I had not been there before the war. It is sometimes said that Comte influenced me most. This is perhaps true of his sociology, but, as a theory of knowledge, or epistemology, I thought his Positivism too naïve. Comte sets out from Hume, from whose scepticism he escapes by appealing to tradition and to a so-called general opinion. In France, where science and scientific methods are always highly esteemed of this Henri Poincaré was a recent example—Comte’s Positivism had a powerful influence; but the Positivist yearning for clearness and precision may easily lead to a one-sided intellectualism. At bottom, the French cult of reason (from Descartes to the Revolution and to Comte’s Positivism after the Revolution) is what Kant means by “mathematical prejudice” and “pure reason”; and in France as in Germany it ended in a fiasco. Comte himself became a fetish-worshipper and went off, here and there, into a wild Romanticism. One has to be careful about the famous clarity of French thought!
Very early in my intellectual life, the great problem of the French Revolution and Restoration began to persecute me. It was as a link between the Revolution and the Restoration that Comte interested me, for the founder of Positivism and of the Positivist Religion of Humanity carried out the policy of de Maistre. I read Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire (whom, somehow, I did not like) on the one hand, and de Maistre and de Tocqueville on the other. I mention only the most important, though I was acquainted with all the rest, great and small.
I had a pretty severe attack of French Romanticism.
