PIERRE PAUL, a philosopher and statesman of France, who, by his noble character even more than by his writings, merited the esteem of his contemporaries, over whom he exercised a great influence, was born on the 22d of June 1763, at Sompeus, near Vitry-le-Francais. Having received his elementary education at a school of which his maternal uncle was the superior, he, at the age of twenty, became a member of the bar in Paris. On the breaking out of the Revolution he embraced the reform doctrines, and attached himself, with all the ardour of his nature, to the principles of that strange time. On the taking of the Bastille he was chosen a member of the first organized municipality, and he remained secretary to that body to the 10th of August 1792. Royer-Collard, with the quick sagacity of his nature, saw that no bounds were to be set to the rage of the predominant revolutionists, and he resolved, while there was yet time, to retrace his steps. He accordingly separated himself forever from the fierce and fiery revolutionists, and joined the moderate monarchical party. In 1797, perceiving the absolute impossibility of establishing in France a republican form of government, he put himself in communication with the members of the royalist committee established in Paris. When Napoleon was elevated to the empire, the royalist agents disappeared, and Royer-Collard, renouncing politics, devoted himself entirely to the study of literature and philosophy. He meditated deeply on Pascal, Corneille, Bossuet, and Racine; he read and re-read La Bruyère, and he studied Milton without ceasing. Thucydides was the book of his old age, and Plato the book of his entire life. The philosophes of the eighteenth century, with their eternal cry about Sensationalism, and its competency to explain all human knowledge, he profoundly disbelieved; but as yet he saw no genuine guidance from that dreary desolation in which these savants would have immersed him. There chanced to meet his eye one day, on a bookseller's stall, a volume which he felt a strong desire to read. He bought the book, and went straight home to pursue the Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense of Dr Thomas Reid. Charmed with the sagacity of the Scottish philosopher, he procured his Intellectual Powers; and these, as well as his Active Powers, afforded him the food he was in search of. From that day Reid became a household word among the philosophers of France, and before many years Jouffroy presented the Œuvres de Reid to the French public. Kant, Descartes, Plato, and Schelling, the other philosophers to whom modern French eclecticism owes its origin, had not been as yet expounded to the French students by M. Cousin. Royer-Collard embraced, accordingly, the spiritualism of Reid, and with no very profound philosophical reading commenced in 1810 to expound him. "That distinguished philosopher (Royer-Collard)," says Sir William Hamilton, "has, however, placed too great a reliance upon the accuracy of Reid." (Reid's Works, p. 262.) He had been appointed professor of history and of philosophy at the normal school; and in 1813 he delivered a remarkable discourse upon philosophical studies, which was destined to be his last. The events of 1814 came to carry off this earnest philosopher from his admiring pupils of the normal school. The following year he was chosen deputy of the Marne, was made a councillor of state, director of the library, and president of the commission of public instruction. In these various departments he reformed abuses, introduced important changes and ameliorations; and so popular had he become, that in 1827 no fewer than seven colleges chose him at once as their deputy. The same year he was admitted a member of the French Academy in the room of the great geometer Laplace. He led the discussion on the constitution in the Chamber of Peers in 1831; and after the triumph of the coalition in 1839 he finally retired from public life. Royer-Collard, after spending an honourable career both as a philosopher and as a statesman, died at Châteauvieux, near Saint-Aignan, on the 2d September 1845, in his eighty-second year. His philosophical papers will be found published in his Fragments.