And now, let us come to another consideration. If any book needs to be extremely correct in its expressions and definitions, surely elementary text‐books for beginners must be so; for, if the foundation is wrong, what is built upon it cannot be right. Now, we are sorry to say that F. Louage’s _Course of __ Philosophy_ teems with false notions and incorrect expressions. Dr. Brownson openly rejects the author’s definition of _philosophy_, of _being_, of _existence_, of _possibility_, of _essence_, of _science_; and in the main he is evidently right. Yet, while we admit with Dr. Brownson that “the science of the supersensible” is not a good definition of philosophy, we do not adopt his own definition, “the science of _principles_”; because we know that the true definition of philosophy is “the science of _things_ (supersensible or not) through their highest principles.” Nor do we agree with him that F. Louage’s definition of _being_—“that which exists or may exist”—is incorrect; for, although what may exist, but does not exist, is no thing in the real order, yet it is something in the ideal order, as an object of thought; and therefore F. Louage’s definition of _being_ is perfectly correct. His definition of possibility, as “the agreement of the attributes which constitute a being, in such a way that its existence does not involve any contradiction,” we do not approve, not exactly for the reason adduced by Dr. Brownson, that the non‐existent has no attributes, but because the definition considers the attributes as “constituents” of being (which they are not), and because the word “agreement” should either be replaced by “non‐repugnance,” or at least qualified by the epithet “intellectual,” referring to the divine intellect, in which all possibilities are ideally contained. That “the essence of a being consists of the collection of its essential attributes,” as the author of the “text‐book” says (p. 7), is certainly a great error. The attributes of a being are not the material components of its essence, nor do they precede the essence; it is, on the contrary, from the essence itself that all the attributes flow. The essence of any given being is nothing else than “the ratio of a given act to its term,” as has been clearly established by a writer in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, March, 1874, and the attributes of any given being are nothing else than different aspects of the actuality of its essence. It is no less erroneous to say that “a genus is a collection of beings having one or more attributes common to each” (p. 8). This definition might be admitted in natural history; but, in philosophy, genus is not a collection, nor is it conceived by composition, but by abstraction. Genus is usually defined to be “a ratio which can be found in many things, and be predicated of each of them when an incomplete answer is given to the question _What is it?_” To confound the universal with the collective is inexcusable, we think, in a “text‐book” of philosophy.