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r. F. EOGET, ON ERNEST NAVILLe's LIFE. 



William III. to settle there in a scientific capacity. Andre De 

 Luc was reader to Queen Charlotte from 1773, a member of 

 the Eoyal Society of London and of that of Dublin ; a part of 

 his writing is in English, and he died in England in 1817. 



Le Sage too was an associate of the Eoyal Society of London ; 

 the same honour befell Theodore de Saussure. My kinsman, the 

 late Dr. Feter Mark Eoget, a citizen of Geneva by birth, and 

 upholder of the conception of the universe which it is the aim 

 of this Institute to help in demonstrating, not only was true to 

 the Geneva scientific traditions, but found in this very attitude 

 every satisfaction of mind, whether scientific or philosophic, and 

 even the approval of the Eoyal Society of London, whose 

 secretary he was for a very long period. 



Spiritualistic philosophy assuredly is no novel invention. 

 But, declares Naville, so far from being superannuated it 

 embodies a comparatively recent doctrine, for which the 

 ancients had no name, and for which England itself, one of its 

 principal homes, has not yet found an extremely distinct title, 

 for theosophists style themselves spiritualists, an ignorant usur- 

 pation which is much to be deprecated. The middle ages did 

 not either succeed in freeing spiritualistic philosophy from alloys. 

 In modern times, spiritualism, instead of being allowed as clear 

 a definition as materiahsm, mysticism, idealism, etc., which 

 nobody can confuse with any other set of metaphysics or with 

 each other, has thus been somewhat loosely or promiscuously 

 made to cover incongruous doctrines. 



But much may be expected from the future, writes ^sTaville : 

 the history of philosophy is not a chaos in which contradictory 

 opinions confusedly elbow each other. It is not either a circle 

 within which the human mind turns round and round without 

 making any progress. The history of philosophy moves in a 

 definite direction and has its meaning. It has a logical ratio ; 

 independent from books and systems, it is a kind of syllogism 

 in time and space. The history of philosophy shows a 

 progressive producing and winnowing of the contents of 

 philosophic thought which will clear away the idealistic 

 philosophies on one hand, the materialistic on the other, free 

 our thought from passive philosophies such as mysticism, 

 scepticism, secularism and ultimately found victoriously the 

 explanation of the universe upon the might of an eternal 

 Spirit. The main current of thought, the contents of our mind, 

 our mental legacy and moral inheritance from the past, move 

 along towards a philosophy of the spirit, and the eddies of the 

 stream are as retrospective moments in an onward march. 



