Cousin, Victor, the founder of systematic eclecticism in modern philosophy, was born in Paris, November 28, 1792. He studied with brilliant success at the Lycée Charlemagne and the École Normale. He was attracted to the study of philosophy by Laromiguière, a disciple of Locke and Condillac; but appointed in 1815 assistant-professor to Royer-Collard at the Faculty of Letters, he threw himself heartily into the reaction against the sensualistic philosophy and literature of the 18th century. Following the path of his senior, he became an exponent of the doctrines of the Scottish metaphysicians, but exhibited far more brilliancy than the original authors of these doctrines. In 1817 Cousin visited Germany, and already introduced to its bolder speculative systems, he now zealously studied Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For his liberalism he was in 1821 deprived of his offices; and in a second visit to Germany in 1824-1825, suspected of carbonarism, he was arrested at Dresden, presumably at the instigation of the French police, and sent to Berlin, where he was detained for six months.
He took advantage of his compulsory residence in the capital of Prussia further to study the philosophy of Hegel. On his return to France he took a decided stand against the reactionary policy of Charles X., and in 1827 was reinstated in his chair at the Sorbonne. Meanwhile he had appeared as an author. During 1820-27 he published his editions of Proclus and Descartes and part of his celebrated translation of Plato. It has been said that to find an audience as numerous and as passionately interested as were those of Cousin, it would be necessary to go back to the days of Abelard. Cousin threw great moral earnestness into his work; his doctrines were for the most part new to his hearers, bold, and in harmony with the spirit of the time. The finest qualities of the national genius appeared in his lectures, a wonderful lucidity of exposition, a beauty of style such as few philosophers have equalled, and a power of co-ordinating the facts of history and philosophy in such a manner as to make each illustrate the other. At this period Cousin was one of the most influential leaders of opinion in Paris; and consequently, after the revolution of 1830, when his friend Guizot became prime-minister, Cousin was made a member of the Council of Public Instruction; in 1832 a peer of France; and later, Director of the École Normale. The great success of his efforts for the organisation of primary instruction was largely a consequence of those valuable reports which he drew up, from personal observation, on the state of public education in Germany and Holland. In 1840 he was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and in the same year became Minister of Public Instruction in the cabinet of Thiers. The revolution of 1848 found in Cousin a friend rather than an enemy, and he aided the government of Cavaignac. After 1849 he disappeared from public life. In his last years he lived in a suite of rooms in the Sorbonne, and he died at Cannes, 13th January 1867.
His philosophy is eclecticism, but not mere syncretism. He has a definite criterion of truth, and a definite method of observation, analysis, and induction; his system comprises psychology, ontology, and an eclectic history of philosophy. Psychological observation gives three great factors—sensibility, activity or liberty, and reason, the latter being impersonal. Cousin repudiates pantheism, with which he has often been charged; and criticising the opposing systems of sensationalism, idealism, scepticism, and mysticism as incomplete rather than false, he holds that each expresses a real order of phenomena and ideas. Cousin's influence revived the study of philosophy in France, and especially renewed interest in the history of philosophy. Amongst his pupils more or less influenced by his teaching are Jouffroy, Rémusat, Barthélemy St Hilaire, Jules Simon, and Janet.
Cousin's chief works (besides those already mentioned) are Fragmens Philosophiques (1826), Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie (1827), Cours d'Histoire de la Philosophie Moderne (1841), Cours d'Histoire de la Philosophie Morale au XVIIIe Siècle (1840-41), Leçons de Philosophie sur Kant (1842), Études sur les Femmes et la Société du XVIIe Siècle (1853), his famous Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien (1854; 23d ed. 1881), works on Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Pascal, and his editions of Abelard and Pascal's Pensées. See Sir W. Hamilton's critique in the Discussions; Janet, Victor Cousin et son Œuvre (1885); Jules Simon's Monograph (1887; trans. by Masson, 1888); and Barthélemy St Hilaire, Victor Cousin, sa Vie et Correspondance (3 vols. 1895).