This _resume_ was wholly made. We had only to take again the lectures already quite old, but little known, because they belonged to a time when the courses of the Faculte des Lettres had scarcely any influence beyond the Quartier Latin, and, also, because they could be found only in a considerable collection, comprising all our first instruction, from 1815 to 1821.[1] These lectures were there, as it were, lost in the crowd. We have drawn them hence, and give them apart, severely corrected, in the hope that they will thus be accessible to a greater number of readers, and that their true character will the better appear. The eighteen lectures that compose this volume have in fact the particular trait that, if the history of philosophy furnishes their frame-work, philosophy itself occupies in them the first place, and that, instead of researches of erudition and criticism, they present a regular exposition of the doctrine which was at first fixed in our mind, which has not ceased to preside over our labors. This book, then, contains the abridged but exact expression of our convictions on the fundamental points of philosophic science. In it will be openly seen the method that is the soul of our enterprise, our principles, our processes, our results. Under these three heads, the True, the Beautiful, the Good, we embrace psychology, placed by us at the head of all philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, natural right, even public right to a certain extent, finally theodicea, that perilous _rendez-vous_ of all systems, where different principles are condemned or justified by their consequences. It is the affair of our book to plead its own cause. We only desire that it may be appreciated and judged according to what it really is, and not according to an opinion too much accredited. Eclecticism is persistently represented as the doctrine to which men deign to attach our name. We declare that eclecticism is very dear to us, for it is in our eyes the light of the history of philosophy; but the source of that light is elsewhere. Eclecticism is one of the most important and most useful applications of the philosophy which we teach, but it is not its principle.