I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

"Peter Gay describes Taine's reaction to the Jacobins as stigmatization drawing on The French Revolution in which Taine argues:

Some of the workmen are shrewd Politicians whose sole object is to furnish the public with words instead of things; others ordinary scribblers of abstractions or even ignoramuses and unable to distinguish words from things imagine that they are framing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases. The Origins of Contemporary France (1875/1893). As Leo Spitzer has written the actual science of the idea which is vaguely Darwinian is rather tenuous and shortly after Taine's work was publiHippolyte Tained a number of objections were made on scientific grounds.

Taine is particularly remembered for his three-pronged approach to the contextual study of a work of art based on the aspects of what he called "race milieu and moment". He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Taine had a profound effect on French literature; the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica asserted that "the tone which pervades the works of Zola Bourget and Maupassant can be immediately attributed to the influence we call Taine's.