⚠The image is heavily speckled with foxing/staining, though the printed text remains legible.

INTRODUCTION

It seems, at first glance, that one requires something of the cou-

rage of despair to come forward and speak once more of spirit-

ualist philosophy A school of thought emphasizing the reality of the soul and spirit over matter. in our era of positive science Refers to Positivism, a philosophy holding that every rational proof can be verified by scientific experiment. and

at a moment when psycho-physiology seems destined to em-

brace within its domain of experiments all, or near-

ly all, that has belonged until now to classical

philosophy.

What gives us this courage is that we have
ourselves passed through this phase of materialist po-
sitivism and that we have emerged from it, just as will
emerge, in our opinion, all those who find within
science itself the answers to the first objec-
tions raised by scientific studies against the
vague metaphysics and the unproven assertions
which constitute the classical spiritualist philosophy of
Cousin Victor Cousin (1792–1867), an influential French philosopher who led the "eclectic" school of spiritualism. and his successors.

The path which has led us to our current conceptions
concerning Man, the Universe, and God, is far from being
new, since it links back to those ideas taught
in the temples of Egypt as early as 2600 BC
and which later constituted Platonism and, in large
part, Neo-Platonism.

Now, faced with the difficulties experienced by mater-
ialist positivism in providing an explanation for psychologi-