May our voice be heard by new generations as it was by the serious youth of the Restoration! Yes, it is particularly to you that we address this work, young men whom we no longer know, but whom we bear in our heart, because you are the seed and the hope of the future. We have shown you the principle of our evils and their remedy. If you love liberty and your country, shun what has destroyed them. Far from you be that sad philosophy which preaches to you materialism and atheism as new doctrines destined to regenerate the world: they kill, it is true, but they do not regenerate. Do not listen to those superficial spirits who give themselves out as profound thinkers, because after Voltaire they have discovered difficulties in Christianity: measure your progress in philosophy by your progress in tender veneration for the religion of the Gospel. Be well persuaded that, in France, democracy will always traverse liberty, that it brings all right into disorder, and through disorder into dictatorship. Ask, then, only a moderated liberty, and attach yourself to that with all the powers of your soul. Do not bend the knee to fortune, but accustom yourselves to bow to law. Entertain the noble sentiment of respect. Know how to admire,--possess the worship of great men and great things. Reject that enervating literature, by turns gross and refined, which delights in painting the miseries of human nature, which caresses all our weaknesses, which pays court to the senses and the imagination, instead of speaking to the soul and awakening thought. Guard yourselves against the malady of our century, that fatal taste of an accommodating life, incompatible with all generous ambition. Whatever career you embrace, propose to yourselves an elevated aim, and put in its service an unalterable constancy. _Sursum corda_, value highly your heart, wherein is seen all philosophy, that which we have retained from all our studies, which we have taught to your predecessors, which we leave to you as our last word, our final lecture. V. COUSIN. _June 15, 1853._ * * * * * A too indulgent public having promptly rendered necessary a new edition of this book, we are forced to render it less unworthy of the suffrages which it has obtained, by reviewing it with severe attention, by introducing a mass of corrections in detail, and a considerable number of additions, among which the only ones that need be indicated here are some pages on Christianity at the end of Lecture XVI., and the notes placed as an Appendix[2] at the end of the volume, on various works of French masters which we have quite recently seen in England, which have confirmed and increased our old admiration for our national art of the seventeenth century. _November 1, 1853._ FOOTNOTES: [1] 1st Series of our work, _Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie Moderne_, five volumes.