Lachelier, a disciple of Ravaisson, brought out--as has been already remarked [Footnote: Page 3.]--the significance of the operations of vital forces and of liberty. Guyau, whose brief life ended in 1888 and whose posthumous work La Genese de I'Idee de Temps was reviewed by Bergson two years after the publication of his own Time and Free Will, laid great stress on the intensification and expansion of life. Boutroux, in his work, has insisted upon the fact of contingency. These forecasts of Bergson's thought made by men to whom he owes much and for whom he personally has the greatest admiration are interesting, but we are not yet able to look upon his work through the medium of historical perspective. We can however see it as the culmination of various tendencies in modern French philosophy; first, the effort to bring philosophy into the open air of human nature, into immediate contact with life and with problems vital to humanity; secondly, the upholding of contingency in all things, thus ensuring human freedom; thirdly, a disparagement of purely intellectual constructions as true interpretations of human life and all existence, coupled with an insistence on an insight that transcends logical formulation. As a thinker, Bergson is very difficult to classify. "All classification of philosophies is effected, as a rule, either by their methods or by their results, 'empirical' and 'a priori' is a classification by methods; 'realist' and 'idealist' is a classification by results. An attempt to classify Bergson's philosophy, in either of these ways, is hardly likely to be successful, since it cuts across all the recognized divisions." [Footnote: Mr. Bertrand Russell's remark at the opening of his Lecture on The Philosophy of Bergson, before The Heretics, Trinity College, Cambridge, March 11, 1912.] We find that Bergson cannot be put in any of the old classes or schools, or identified with any of the innumerable isms. He brings together, without being eclectic, action and reflection, free will and determinism, motion and rest, intellect and intuition, subjectivity and externality, idealism and realism, in a most unconventional way. His whole philosophy is destructive of a large amount of the "vested interests" of philosophy. "We are watching the rise of a new agnosticism," remarked Dr. Bosanquet. A similar remark came from one of Bergson's own countrymen, Alfred Fouillee, who, in his work Le Mouvement idealist et la reaction contre la science positive, expressed the opinion that Bergson's philosophy could but issue in le scepticisme et le nihilisme (p. 206). Bergson runs counter to so many established views that his thought has raised very wide and animated discussions. The list of English and American articles in the Bibliography appended to the present work shows this at a glance. In his preface to the volume on Gabriel Tarde, his predecessor in the chair of Modern Philosophy at the College de France, written in 1909, we find