Hippolyte Taine in the context of "Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition"

Émile Boutmy (13 April 1835 – 25 January 1906) was a French political scientist and sociologist who was a native of Paris.

He studied law in Paris, and from 1867 to 1870 gave lectures on the history and culture of civilizations as it pertained to architecture at the École Spéciale d'Architecture. Being shocked by the ignorance and disinterest in regards to political issues that he observed during the Paris Commune, he founded in 1872 the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques with important industrialists and academics that included Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel and Pierre Paul Leroy-Beaulieu.

In epistemology, sensualism is a doctrine whereby sensations and perception are the basic and most important form of true cognition. It may oppose abstract ideas.

This ideogenetic question was long ago put forward in Greek philosophy (Stoicism, Epicureanism) and further developed to the full by the British Sensualists (John Locke, David Hume) and the British Associationists (Thomas Brown, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley). In the 19th century, it was very much taken up by the Positivists (Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Hippolyte Taine, Émile Littré)