M. Royer-Collard was the first who had the merit and the honor of bringing back Spiritualism into the teaching of philosophy and into the minds of the people; his was a return simply to the spiritualistic doctrines of the seventeenth century; but still a real progress, effected by a novel route, and a really scientific method. M. Royer-Collard was neither a philosopher by profession nor the disciple of any master, nor was his mind a mind disposed to take up with systems--he observed, he read, he studied and reflected, as a looker on, and an earnest judge of the world and of men. In philosophy and his professional chair, as later in politics and in the chamber, he was an original and profound thinker. {220} His mind united good sense with loftiness of sentiment, circumspection with self-respect; he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his times, at the same time that he refused to accept its yoke. In his grave and independent course of instruction, he treated philosophical questions as they presented themselves step by step, each on its own account, without troubling himself about anything but the discovery of the truth; and still less with any zealous endeavor to set together or resolve all the questions upon a general system, the result of any learned premeditation. Those who had opportunities of listening to him, and even those whose only means of judgment are the fragments published by M. Jouffroy, [Footnote 34] characterize his lessons as directed, each of them, toward some special questions well determined beforehand, and they regard them as models of analysis and of philosophical criticism, scrupulously confined by the lecturer to the facts and the results that the inductive process discovers in the facts themselves. [Footnote 34: In his "Traduction des oeuvres complètes de Reid," vol. iii, pp. 299-449, vol. iv, pp. 273-451.] {221}