From the time of Malebranche, who died in 1715, to Maine de Biran, Royer-Collard, Ampère and Cousin, a period of about a century, philosophy in France had not borne an honorable name. The French mind was active; philosophy was a profession; the philosophical world was larger than in Germany, where it was limited to the Universities. But France took no lead in speculation, it waited to receive impulse from other lands; and even then, instead of taking up the impulse and carrying it on with original and sympathetic force, it was content to exhibit and reproduce it. The office of expositor, made easy by the perspicacity of its intellect and the flexibility of its language, was accepted and discharged with a cleverness that was recognized by all Europe. Its histories of philosophy, translations, expositions, reproductions, were admirable for neatness and clearness. The most obscure systems became intelligible in that limpid and lucid speech, which reported with faultless dexterity the agile movements of the Gallic mind, and made popular the most abstruse doctrines of metaphysics. German philosophy in its original dress was outlandish, even to practised students in German. The readers of French were many in England and the United States, and the readers of French, without severe labor on their part, were put in possession of the essential ideas of the deep thinkers of the race. The best accounts of human speculation are in French. Barthélemy Saint Hilaire interprets Aristotle, and throws important light on Indian Philosophy; Bouillet translates Plotinus; Emil Saisset translates Spinoza; Tissot and Jules Barni perform the same service for Kant; Jules Simon and Etienne Vacherot undertake to make intelligible the School of Alexandria; Paul Janet explains the dialectics of Plato; Adolphe Franck deals with the Jewish Kabbala; Charles de Rémusat with Anselm, Abelard and Bacon; MM. Hauréau and Rousselot with the philosophy of the middle age; M. Chauvet with the theories of the human understanding in antiquity. Cousin published unedited works of Proclus, analyzed the commentaries of Olympiodorus on the Platonic dialogues, made a complete translation of Plato, admirable for clearness and strength, and proposed to present, not of course with his own hand, but by the hands of friendly fellow-workers, and under his own direction, examples of whatever was best in every philosophical system. The philosophical work of France is ably summed up in the report on "Philosophy in France in the nineteenth century," presented by Felix Ravaisson, member of the Institute, and published in 1868, under the auspices of the Ministry of Public Instruction.