The Method or Logic of history followed the Philosophy of history; a gnoseology of the conceptions which are employed in the natural sciences succeeded natural philosophy. What philosophy can study of the one is its mode of construction (intuition, perception, document, probability, etc.); of the others she can study the forms of the conceptions which appear in them (space, time, motion, number, types, classes, etc.). Philosophy, which should become metaphysical in the sense above described, would, on the other hand, claim to compete with narrative history, and with the natural sciences, which in their field are alone legitimate and effective. Such a competition becomes in fact a labour spoiling labour. We are _antimetaphysical_ in this sense, while yet declaring ourselves _ultrametaphysical_, if by that word it be desired to claim and to affirm the function of philosophy as the autoconsciousness of the spirit, as opposed to the merely empirical and classificatory function of the natural sciences. [Sidenote] _Mental imagination and the intuitive intellect._ In order to maintain itself side by side with the sciences of the spirit, metaphysic has been obliged to assert the existence of a specific spiritual activity, of which it would be the product. This activity, which in antiquity was called _mental or superior imagination_, and in modern times more often _intuitive intellect or intellectual intuition_, would unite in an altogether special form the characters of imagination and of intellect. It would provide the method of passing, by deduction or dialectically, from the infinite to the finite, from form to matter, from the concept to the intuition, from science to history, operating by a method which should be at once unity and compenetration of the universal and the particular, of the abstract and the concrete, of intuition and of intellect. A faculty marvellous indeed and delightful to possess; but we, who do not possess it, have no means of proving its existence. [Sidenote] _Mystical aesthetic._ Intellectual intuition has sometimes been considered as the true aesthetic activity. At others a not less marvellous aesthetic activity has been placed beside, below, or above it, a faculty altogether different from simple intuition. The glories of this faculty have been sung, and to it have been attributed the fact of art, or at the least certain groups of artistic production, arbitrarily chosen. Art, religion, and philosophy have seemed in turn one only, or three distinct faculties of the spirit, now one, now another of these being superior in the dignity assigned to each.