``Let us say it courageously and patriotically, for patriotism consists above all in telling the truth to one's own country: Germany sees in France, with regard to the past, a people who, with the great words `liberty' and `fraternity' in its mouth, oppressed, trampled, murdered, pillaged, and fleeced her for fifteen years; and with regard to the present, a people who, with the same words on its banners, is organising a despotic, oppressive, mischievous, and ruinous democracy, which none would seek to imitate. This is what Germany may well see in France; and this, according to her books and journals, is, we may assure ourselves, what she does see.'' For the rest, whatever the worth of the verdicts pronounced upon the French Revolution, we may be certain that the writers of the future will consider it as an event as passionately interesting as it is instructive. A Government bloodthirsty enough to guillotine old men of eighty years, young girls, and little children: which covered France with ruins, and yet succeeded in repulsing Europe in arms; an archduchess of Austria, Queen of France, dying on the scaffold, and a few years later another archduchess, her relative, replacing her on the same throne and marrying a sub- lieutenant, turned Emperor--here are tragedies unique in human history. The psychologists, above all, will derive lessons from a history hitherto so little studied by them. No doubt they will finally discover that psychology can make no progress until it renounces chimerical theories and laboratory experiments in order to study the events and the men who surround us.[7] [7] This advice is far from being banal. The psychologists of the day pay very little attention to the world about them, and are even surprised that any one should study it. I have come across an interesting proof of this indifferent frame of mind in a review of one of my books which appeared in the Revue philosophique and was inspired by the editor of the review. The author reproaches me with ``exploring the world and the newspapers rather than books.'' I most gladly accept this reproach. The manifold facts of the journals and the realities of the world are far more instructive than philosophical lucubrations such as the Revue is stuffed with. Philosophers are beginning to see the puerility of such reproaches. It was certainly of the forty volumes of this fastidious publication that Mr. William James was thinking when he wrote that all these dissertations simply represented ``a string of facts clumsily observed and a few quarrelsome discussions.'' Although he is the author of the best known treatise on psychology extant, the eminent thinker realises ``the fragility of a science that oozes metaphysical criticism at every joint.'' For more than twenty years I have tried to interest psychologists in the study of realities, but the stream of university metaphysics is hardly yet turned aside, although it has lost its former force