MAINE DE BIRAN, tnfin de be'riix', FRAN cOIS PIERRE GONTIIIER 1766-1824). A French metaphysician. He was born at Bergerac in the Department of Dordogne and was trained by the frures doctrinaires of Wrigueux. In 1785 he joined the bodyguard of Louis XVI.. but retired to his native town on the outbreak of the lution. He was elected to the Five Hundred in 1797. became sous-prefet of Bergerac in 1806. Count of the Empire in 1809,and in 1812 made his permanent home in Paris. Ile changed from Napoleon to the Bourbons, sat in the loyal chamber of 1816. and remained an ardent royalist till his death, July 20, 1824, Maine de Biran published very little during his lifetime, and his full importance was appreciated only by those who knew him intimately, men like lard and Cousin, the latter of whom speaks of Biran as his teacher. His theories in their tirety remained unknown until Cousin published a part of his works in 1841, and Naville issued his Life (1851), and an edition of his important writings (1859). Chief among these are: ports du physique ct du moral; Essai sur les s do psychologie; Nouveaux essaia d'unth•opologic. In the beginning Biran was a sensualist and a follower of Condillae, but found mechanical sensation incapable of explaining the phenomenon of consciousness. He worked out a system of personality in which the ego was made the centre of the universe, original and uncreated itself, treating everything outside itself. This ego Biran identified with living force—will (in this anticipating Schopenhauer).
At first will is merely blind, unconscious effort (Schopenhauer's will-to-live) ; passing through the stages of sensation, or glimmer ing consciousness and perception, or the con sciousness of concrete objects, it attains its high est development in reflection, abstract thought, when the ego formulates mathematical truths and is capable of contemplating itself. Life, then, is will; and the outer world is not mate rial, but merely the impression produced by the clashing of other wills against our own. The world exists only as conditioned by wily; God exists because the idea of God is necessarily grounded in the nature of the will. This reason ing influenced Fichte and the German idealists, but failed to retain its hold on Biran himself. If the world. he went on to argue, is the realiza tion of will, does not the unchanging order of the universe presuppose an invincible, infallible will, striving ever at one aim according to im mutable laws of its own nature? Such an ex alted living force Biran failed to find in the pitiful human will, and he saw himself driven into the assumption of a superhuman will. whose image the universe might be—God. And as for merly everything and God were to him creatures of man's will, now everything, including man, was hut the manifestation of the divine will. Biran was well on the way to mysticism when he died. Consult Naville, Maine de Biran (3d ed., Paris, 1874).