might be attained by
sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original.
Excepting one unduly favoured competitor, who fills two pages with
untranslated French, there is little direct quotation. Cournot is one of
those who, having been overlooked at first, are here raised to
prominence. He is urgently, and justly, recommended to the attention of
students. "They will find that every page bears the impress of patient,
independent, and sagacious thought. I believe I have not met with a more
genuine thinker in the course of my investigations. He was a man of the
finest intellectual qualities, of a powerful and absolutely truthful
mind." But then we are warned that Cournot never wrote a line for the
general reader, and accordingly he is not permitted to speak for
himself. Yet it was this thoughtful Frenchman who said: "Aucune idee
parmi celles qui se referent a l'ordre des faits naturels ne tient de
plus pres a la famille des idees religieuses que l'idee du progres, et
n'est plus propre a devenir le principe d'une sorte de foi religieuse
pour ceux qui n'en ont pas d'autres. Elle a, comme la foi religieuse, la
vertu de relever les ames et les caracteres."

The successive theories gain neither in clearness nor in contrast by the
order in which they stand. As other countries are reserved for other
volumes, Cousin precedes Hegel, who was his master, whilst Quetelet is
barely mentioned in his own place, and has to wait for Buckle, if not
for Oettingen and Ruemelin, before he comes on for discussion. The finer
threads, the underground currents, are not carefully traced. The
connection between the _juste milieu_ in politics and eclecticism in
philosophy was already stated by the chief eclectic; but the subtler
link between the Catholic legitimists and democracy seems to have
escaped the author's notice. He says that the republic proclaimed
universal suffrage in 1848, and he considers it a triumph for the party
of Lafayette. In fact, it was the triumph of an opposite school--of
those legitimists who appealed from the narrow franchise which sustained
the Orleans dynasty to the nation behind it. The chairman of the
constitutional committee was a legitimist, and he, inspired by the abbe
de Genoude, of the _Gazette de France_, and opposed by Odilon Barrot,
insisted on the pure logic of absolute democracy.

It is an old story now that the true history of philosophy is the true
evolution of philosophy, and that when we have