Key Arguments

• He asserts a general thesis that 'Nature makes no man truly complete, and ... the development of certain faculties almost always excludes an equal development of the opposite faculties,' introducing this as the key to Lamennais’s mediocrity as a thinker.
• He characterizes Lamennais as 'preeminently a poet, a man of feeling and sentiment,' drawing a direct connection between temperament and philosophical incapacity.
• He describes Lamennais’s style as 'exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration and invective,' and infers 'hold it for certain that no man possessed of such a style was ever a true metaphysician.'
• He claims this 'wealth of expression and illustration, which everybody admires, becomes in M. Lamennais the incurable cause of his philosophical impotence,' because his 'flow of language, and his sensitive nature misleading his imagination, he thinks that he is reasoning when he is only repeating himself, and readily takes a description for a logical deduction.'
• He links Lamennais’s stylistic and emotional traits to specific intellectual defects: 'horror of positive ideas, his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all sorts of entités.'
• He generalizes from Lamennais’s biography that his life-course—from ultramontane theocrat to progressive Christian democrat to deist and near‑skeptic—demonstrates an 'anti-philosophical genius,' a mind moved by feeling and fashion rather than by rigorous, stable principles.

Source Quotes

Lamennais considered as a thinker, a mediocrity which disclosed itself at the time of the publication of the Essai sur l’Indifférence? It is because (remember this well, proletaires!) Nature makes no man truly complete, and because the development of certain faculties almost always excludes an equal development of the opposite faculties; it is because M. Lamennais is preeminently a poet, a man of feeling and sentiment. Look at his style⁠—exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration and invective⁠—and hold it for certain that no man possessed of such a style was ever a true metaphysician.

Lamennais is preeminently a poet, a man of feeling and sentiment. Look at his style⁠—exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration and invective⁠—and hold it for certain that no man possessed of such a style was ever a true metaphysician. This wealth of expression and illustration, which everybody admires, becomes in M.

Look at his style⁠—exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration and invective⁠—and hold it for certain that no man possessed of such a style was ever a true metaphysician. This wealth of expression and illustration, which everybody admires, becomes in M. Lamennais the incurable cause of his philosophical impotence. His flow of language, and his sensitive nature misleading his imagination, he thinks that he is reasoning when he is only repeating himself, and readily takes a description for a logical deduction.

Lamennais the incurable cause of his philosophical impotence. His flow of language, and his sensitive nature misleading his imagination, he thinks that he is reasoning when he is only repeating himself, and readily takes a description for a logical deduction. Hence his horror of positive ideas, his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all sorts of entités.

His flow of language, and his sensitive nature misleading his imagination, he thinks that he is reasoning when he is only repeating himself, and readily takes a description for a logical deduction. Hence his horror of positive ideas, his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all sorts of entités. Further, the entire life of M.

Hence his horror of positive ideas, his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all sorts of entités. Further, the entire life of M. Lamennais is conclusive proof of his anti-philosophical genius. Devout even to mysticism, an ardent ultramontane, an intolerant theocrat, he at first feels the double influence of the religious reaction and the literary theories which marked the beginning of this century, and falls back to the middle ages and Gregory VII; then, suddenly becoming a progressive Christian and a democrat, he gradually leans towards rationalism, and finally falls into deism.

Key Concepts

• Nature makes no man truly complete, and because the development of certain faculties almost always excludes an equal development of the opposite faculties; it is because M. Lamennais is preeminently a poet, a man of feeling and sentiment.
• Look at his style⁠—exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration and invective⁠—and hold it for certain that no man possessed of such a style was ever a true metaphysician.
• This wealth of expression and illustration, which everybody admires, becomes in M. Lamennais the incurable cause of his philosophical impotence.
• he thinks that he is reasoning when he is only repeating himself, and readily takes a description for a logical deduction.
• Hence his horror of positive ideas, his feeble powers of analysis, his pronounced taste for indefinite analogies, verbal abstractions, hypothetical generalities, in short, all sorts of entités.
• Further, the entire life of M. Lamennais is conclusive proof of his anti-philosophical genius.

Context

Second Memoir, continuing the critique of Lamennais; Proudhon moves from textual analysis of L’Esquisse to a psychologico-biographical explanation of its defects, articulating a broader thesis about the incompatibility of certain poetic styles with metaphysical rigor.