Is our system of education to be the issue of naturalism or of idealism, or is there indeed a _media via_? This is practically the question which M. Fouillée sets himself to answer in the spirit of a philosophical educationalist. He examines his premisses and draws his deductions with a candour, culture, and philosophic insight which carry the confidence of the reader. No doubt he is of a mind with that umpire in a cricket-match who lays down the dictum that one must be quite fair to both sides with a _little_ leaning to one’s own. M. Fouillée takes sides with classical as opposed to scientific culture. But he is not a mere partisan; he has philosophic reasons for the faith that is in him, and his examination of the question of national education is full of instruction and inspiration for the thoughtful parent as well as for the schoolmaster. M. Fouillée gives in his preamble a key to his treatment of the subject. He says: “On this as on all great questions of practical philosophy Guyau has left his mark.... He has treated the question from the highest standpoint, and has treated it in a strictly scientific form. ‘Given the hereditary merits and faults of a race, how far can we modify existing heredity by means of education for a new heredity?’ For the problem is nothing less than this. It is not merely a matter of the instruction of individuals, but of the preservation and improvement of the race. Education must therefore be based upon the physiological and moral laws of the culture of races.... The ethnical is the true point of view. By means of education we must create such hereditary tendencies as will be useful to the race both physically and intellectually.” M. Fouillée begins at the beginning. He examines the principle of selection, and shows that it is a working principle, not only in animal, but in intellectual, æsthetic, and moral life. He demonstrates that there is what may be called psychological selection, according to whose laws those _ideas_ which are the fittest rule the world; and it is in the light of this truth, of the natural selection of ideas and of their enormous force, that he would examine into the vexed question of the subjects and methods of education. M. Fouillée complains with justice that no attempt has been made to harmonise or unify education as a whole in any one civilised nation. Controversy rages round quite secondary questions--whether education shall be literary or scientific? and, again, whether the ancient or the modern languages shall be taught? But science and literature do not exhaust the field. Our author introduces a new candidate. He says: “In this volume we shall inquire if the link between science and literature is not to be found in the knowledge of man, of society, of the great laws of the universe--_i.e._, in morals and social science and æsthetics, in a word, in philosophy.”