INTRODUCTION.
IT is to be hoped that, as a consequence of the present active scrutiny of our educational aims and methods, and of the resulting encouragement of the study of modern languages, we shall not remain, as a nation, so much isolated from ideas and tendencies in continental thought and literature as we have been in the past. As things are, however, the translation of this book is doubtless required; at any rate, it brings vividly before us an instructive point of view. Though some of M. Poincaré's chapters have been collected from well-known treatises written several years ago, and indeed are sometimes in detail not quite up to date, besides occasionally suggesting the suspicion that his views may possibly have been modified in the interval, yet their publication in a compact form has excited a warm welcome in this country.
It must be confessed that the English language
