Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption. Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a _tabula rasa_, and to fill up the void which he has so made, he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the man--the entire man--with all the developments of his nature and of his thought. {177} I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very commencement of philosophy,--in short, a mere hypothesis. Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the material world; but from their very commencement both these philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two hypotheses, the _tabula rasa_ of Descartes, and the statue of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy, and Christian faith. {178}