How did race, milieu, and moment explain a writer’s work for Hippolyte Taine?

For the French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, a writer’s work was not an isolated creation but a product of historical and psychological causation. He proposed that any cultural artifact could be explained by analyzing the author's faculté maîtresse (predominant characteristic), which was in turn determined by three great conditioning facts:

• Race: Taine defined this as the inherited temperament or disposition of a people, which persists stubbornly over thousands of years.1
• Milieu: This refers to the specific social, political, and geographical environment that modifies an individual's inherited racial disposition.12
• Moment: This represents the momentum of past and present cultural traditions—the historical situation in which the writer lives and works.12

By applying this scientific approach to literature, Taine sought to uncover the psychology of the author and the underlying motives of a culture. His method emphasized that literature provides the most unguarded displays of a people's psychology, effectively treating the study of art as a branch of historical and psychological science.12