Ennst Casstrir was born in Breslau on July 28, 1874, Upon graduation from the University of Berlin, he con- tinued his studies in philosophy at the University of Marburg. He taught at the Universities of Berlin and” Hamburg until his departure from Germany in 1932 to accept an appointment at Oxford. In 1941, Cassirer came to America to teach at Yale where he remained until 1944. The last year of his life was spent as a visit- ing professor at Columbia University. He died in New York on April 13, 2945. Cassixer’s first works were in the field of epistemology. By 1904, he had completed the first two volumes of his monumental four-volume history of epistemology, The Problem of Knowledge, the final volume of which was in the process of translation at the time of his death. His frst great systematic work, Substance and Function, was published in 1910. Alter the Tirst World Wer, Cassiter began working out the theoxy of symbolic forms, his major contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, which has earned him a place with Bergson, Croce, Dewey, Santayana, and Whitehcad. The three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms were brought out between 1923 and 1929, and the first of these to appear in America has recently been published by the Yale University Press, The last twelve years of Cassircr’s life were devoted to an application of the philosophy of symbolic forms to the various realms of human culture—to art and the social sciences. An Essay on Man, completed in 1944, is the major work of this period.To Charles W. Hendel in friendship and gratitudeAN ESSAY ON MAN An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture BY ERNST CASSIRER DOUBLEDAY . ANCHOR BOOKS DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK .