ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with modest aims and some trepidations. Taine's use of the category of Race is seen against the background of two strong movements in the Europe of his day, first, nationalist developments, cultural and political, both fostered and expressed by the Romantic movement, and the latter resulting in the final unification of Italy and Germany, second, a tremendous growth of biological science, crystallized in Darwin's The Origin of Species, and applied by many thinkers to the nascent social sciences in a movement commonly referred to as 'Social Darwinism'. Race does frequently play an important part in Taine's criticism, though, as has already been suggested, he tends to focus his attention chiefly on problems of history and psychology: Environment, Time, and Master Faculty. The Philosophy of Art in Greece begins with a discussion of Race, and here the line between physiology and geography is especially hard to draw, because, for lack of a detailed history of art itself.
