THREE:"In short the town of Dinant is destroyed. Of 1,400 houses, 200 only remained standing. The factories, where the labouring population got their bread and butter, were wrecked systematically. Many inhabitants were sent to Germany, where they are still kept as prisoners. The majority of the others are scattered all over Belgium. Those who stayed in the towns were starved.On the whole, I am afraid that my acquaintance with the modern literature of the subject will be found rather limited for an undertaking like the present. But I do not think that wider reading in that direction would have much furthered the object I had in view. That object has been to exhibit the principal ideas of Greek philosophy in the closest possible connexion with the characters of their authors, with each other, with their developments in modern speculation, with the parallel tendencies of literature and art, with the history of religion, of physical science, and of civilisation as a whole. To interpret all things by a system of universal references is the method of philosophy; when applied to a series of events this method is the philosophy of history; when the events are ideas, it is the philosophy of philosophy itself.