NOTES TO BOOK THIRD 517 INTRODUCTION. The following translation of the great work of the lamented James Balmes on Philosophy, was undertaken at my suggestion and recommendation, and thus far I hold myself responsible for it. I have compared a considerable portion of it with the original, and as far as I have compared it, I have found it faithfully executed. The translator appears to me to have rendered the author's thought with exactness and precision, in a style not inferior to his own. I have not added, as was originally contemplated, any Notes to those of the author. To have done so, would have swelled the volumes to an unreasonable size, and upon further consideration, they did not seem to me to be necessary. They would, in fact, have been an impertinence on my part, and the reader will rather thank me for not having done it. The work goes forth, therefore, as it came from the hands of its illustrious author, with no addition or abbreviation, or change, except what was demanded by the difference between the Spanish and English idioms. James Balmes, in whose premature death in 1849, the friends of religion and science have still to deplore a serious loss, was one of the greatest writers and profoundest thinkers of Spain, and indeed of our times. He is well and favorably known to the American public by his excellent work on European civilization,--a work which has been translated into the principal languages of Europe. In that work he proved himself a man of free and liberal thought, of brilliant genius, and varied and profound learning. But his work on the bases of philosophy is his master-piece, and, taken as a whole, the greatest work that has been published on that important subject in the nineteenth century. Yet it is rather as a criticism on the various erroneous systems of philosophy in modern times, than as containing a system of philosophy itself, that I have wished it translated and circulated in English. As a refutation of Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Condillac, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Spinoza, it is a master-piece, and leaves little to desire. In determining the fundamental principles of philosophy, and constructing a system in accordance with the real world, the author is not always, in my judgment, successful, and must yield to his Italian contemporary, the unhappy Abbate Gioberti.