He was the founder of "eclecticism", a briefly influential school of French philosophy that combined elements of German idealism and Scottish Common Sense Realism.

Lycées being organically linked to the University of France and its Faculties since their Napoleonic institution (the baccalauréat was awarded by juries made of university professors) Cousin was "crowned" in the ancient hall of the Sorbonne for a Latin oration he wrote which owned him a first prize at the concours général, a competition between the best pupils at lycées (established under the Ancien Régime and reinstated under the First Empire, and still extant).

From the lycée he graduated to the most prestigious of higher education schools, École Normale Supérieure (as it is now called), where Pierre Laromiguière was then lecturing on philosophy.

In the second preface to the Fragments philosophiques, in which he candidly states the varied philosophical influences of his life, Cousin speaks of the grateful emotion excited by the memory of the day when he heard Laromiguière for the first time.

Laromiguière taught the philosophy of John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, happily modified on some points, with a clearness and grace which in appearance at least removed difficulties, and with a charm of spiritual bonhomie which penetrated and subdued.

"[2] That school has remained ever since the living heart of French philosophy; Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida are among its past students.

This teacher, he tells us, "by the severity of his logic, the gravity and weight of his words, turned me by degrees, and not without resistance, from the beaten path of Condillac into the way which has since become so easy, but which was then painful and unfrequented, that of the Scottish philosophy.

[citation needed] In 1815–1816 Cousin attained the position of suppliant (assistant) to Royer-Collard in the history of modern philosophy chair of the faculty of letters.

Another thinker who influenced him at this early period was Maine de Biran, whom Cousin regarded as the unequalled psychological observer of his time in France.

It was through this "triple discipline" that Cousin's philosophical thought was first developed, and that in 1815 he began the public teaching of philosophy in the Normal School and in the faculty of letters.

The following year Cousin went to Munich, where he met Schelling for the first time, and spent a month with him and Jacobi, obtaining a deeper insight into the Philosophy of Nature.

[3] In 1828, Antoine Lefebvre de Vatimesnil, Minister of Public Instruction (1828–1829) in Martignac's ministry, recalled Cousin and Guizot to their professorial positions in the university.

His philosophy showed strikingly the generalizing tendency of the French intellect, and its logical need of grouping details round central principles.

Judged on his teaching influence, Cousin occupies a foremost place in the rank of professors of philosophy, who like Jacobi, Schelling and Dugald Stewart have united the gifts of speculative, expository and imaginative power.

[4] Among those influenced by Cousin were Edgar Allan Poe, Théodore Simon Jouffroy, Jean Philibert Damiron, Adolphe Garnier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, Charles de Rémusat, Orestes Brownson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jules Simon, Paul Janet, Adolphe Franck and Patrick Edward Dove, who dedicated his book The Theory of Human Progression (1850) to him — Jouffroy and Damiron were first fellow-followers.

He was induced by the ministry of which his friend François Guizot was the head to become a member of the council of public instruction and counsellor of state, and in 1832 he was made a Peer of France.

He was in addition director of the Normal School and virtual head of the university, and from 1840 a member of the Academy of the Moral and Political Sciences in the Institut de France.

)[4] In the words of the Edinburgh Review (July 1833), these documents "mark an epoch in the progress of national education, and are directly conducive to results important not only to France but to Europe."

To the enlightened views of the ministries of Guizot and Thiers under the citizen-king, and to the zeal and ability of Cousin in the work of organization, France owes what is best in her system of primary education,—a national interest which had been neglected under the French Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration (see Exposé, p. 17).

As the results of his work in this line, we have, besides the Des Pensées de Pascal, 1842, Audes sur les femmes et la société du XVII siècle 1853.

Speaking in 1853 of the political issues of the spiritual philosophy which he had taught during his lifetime, he says: "It conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls, which in our time can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy.

In the front of the Sorbonne, below the lecture rooms of the faculty of letters, a tablet records an extract from his will, in which he bequeaths his noble and cherished library to the halls of his professorial work and triumphs.

By his method of observation and induction as thus explained, his philosophy will be found to be marked off very clearly, on the one hand from the deductive construction of notions of an absolute system, as represented either by Schelling or Hegel, which Cousin regards as based simply on hypothesis and abstraction, illegitimately obtained; and on the other, from that of Kant, and in a sense, from that of Scottish metaphysician Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet, both of which in the view of Cousin are limited to psychology, and merely relative or phenomenal knowledge, and issue in scepticism so far as the great realities of ontology are concerned.

This was the point which Kant missed in his analysis, and this is the fundamental truth which Cousin thinks he has restored to the integrity of philosophy by the method of the observation of consciousness.

Kant reviewing the enterprise of Aristotle in modern times has given a complete list of the laws of thought, but it is arbitrary in classification and may be legitimately reduced.

The God I plead for is neither the deity of Pantheism, nor the absolute unity of the Eleatics, a being divorced from all possibility of creation or plurality, a mere metaphysical abstraction.

The intellectual intuition of Schelling, as above consciousness, the pure being of Hegel, as an empty abstraction, unvindicated, illegitimately assumed, and arbitrarily developed, are equally useless as bases of metaphysics.

When Cousin thus set himself to vindicate those points by reflection, he gave up the obvious advantage of his other position that the realities in question are given us in immediate and spontaneous apprehension.

Besides, the tendency of applying a formula of this sort to history is to assume that the elements are developed in a certain regular or necessary order, whereas this may not at all be the case; but we may find at any epoch the whole mixed, either crossing or co-operative, as in the consciousness of the individual himself.

[peacock prose][12] Sir W. Hamilton (Discussions, p. 541), one of his most resolute opponents, described Cousin as "A profound and original thinker, a lucid and eloquent writer, a scholar equally at home in ancient and in modern learning, a philosopher superior to all prejudices of age or country, party or profession, and whose lofty eclecticism, seeking truth under every form of opinion, traces its unity even through the most hostile systems.