The author does not seem to be aware that _substance_ as distinguished from being or existence is an abstraction, and therefore purely subjective, and no object of intuition. Abstract from a thing all its properties or attributes, and you have remaining simply zero. The substance is properly the concrete thing itself, and in the real order is distinguishable simply from its phenomena, or _accidents_,--an abstract term,--not from its so-called attributes or properties. Hence, the question, so much disputed, whether we perceive substances themselves, is only the question, whether we see things themselves or only their phenomena. This question the Scottish school of Reid and Sir William Hamilton, have settled forever, and if it had not, Balmes has done it, making the correction I have suggested, in a manner that leaves nothing further to be said. The author's proofs of the fact of creation are strong and well put, but fail to be absolutely conclusive in consequence of his not recognizing intuition of the creative act. They all presuppose this intuition, and are conclusive, because we in reality have it; but by denying that we have it, the author renders them formally inconclusive. We have intuition of God, real and necessary being, we have also intuition of things or existences, and therefore must have intuition of the creative act, for things or existences are only the external terminus of the creative act itself. Hence it is that Gioberti very properly makes the ideal formula, or _primum philosophicum_, the synthetic judgment, _Ens creat existentias_. Real and necessary Being creates existences. This formula or judgment in all its terms is given intuitively, and simultaneously, and it is because it is so given we are able at one blow to confound the skeptic, the atheist, and the pantheist. The illustrious Spaniard, uses in all his argument this formula, but he does so unconsciously, in contradiction, in fact, to his express statements, because he could not reason a moment, form a single conclusion without it. His argument in itself is good, but his explication of it is sometimes in fault. If the learned and excellent author had recognized the fact that we have intuition of the creative act of the first cause, and the further fact that all second causes, in their several spheres and degree, imitate or copy the first, he would have succeeded better in explaining their operation. He does not seem to perceive clearly that the _nexus_ which binds together cause and effect is the act of the cause, which is in its own nature causative of the effect, and by denying all intuition of this _nexus_, he seems to leave us in the position where Hume left us, because it is impossible to attain by discursion to any objective reality of which we have no intuition.