333. Lamennais' error consists in taking the effect for the cause, and the cause for the effect. We detect certain truths, upon which all men are agreed, and we say: the guaranty that each one is right is the consent of all. If we analyze this well, we shall perceive that the reason of each individual's certainty is not the consent of others; but on the contrary the reason why all agree is that each one for himself feels obliged to give his assent. In this universal voting of the human race, each one gives his own vote, impelled in a certain sense by nature herself; and as all experience the same impulse, all vote alike. Lamennais says every one votes in the same way, because all vote so; but he does not observe that then the voting could never begin nor end. This comparison is not an accidental satire, but a strictly philosophical argument, to which there can be no reply; it suffices to show the system of Lamennais to be unfounded and contradictory; just as, on the other hand, it indicates the origin of the equivocation, the taking the effect for the cause. 334. Lamennais, in order to prove his criterion to be the only one, appeals to the testimony of consciousness. In our opinion this testimony establishes directly the contrary. Who ever waited for the authority of others to be certain of the existence of bodies? Do we not see even brutes, by force of a natural impulse, making, in their own way, their sensations objective? Had we not in giving our assent to the words of men some other criterion than common consent, we could never believe any one, for the simple reason that it would be impossible to be certain of what others say or think without beginning by believing some one. Does the child refer to the authority of others before giving faith to what its mother recounts? Does it not rather obey the natural instinct communicated to it by the beneficent hand of the Creator? It does not believe because all believe; but all children believe because each one of them believes: their individual belief does not spring from a general belief, but rather the general belief is formed from the assemblage of individual beliefs; it is not natural because universal, but universal because natural.