4. With such a system, it was useless to deal in ideas: they retained only sensations. Whatever could occupy the mind of man, whether the most imbecile or endowed with the loftiest genius, was nothing more than a sensation transformed. The very brutes possessed all the elements of human intelligence; to think was only to feel more perfectly. Such was the last term of their analysis; such the result of their most accurate observation; such the solution their profoundest philosophy gave to the problems of man's understanding. Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche and Leibnitz were nothing but sublime dreamers, whose genius strongly contrasted with their ignorance of the true nature of things. None of them knew any thing about ideology or metaphysics; these sciences were an unknown world until Locke and Condillac came and discovered them. 5. This school, as fatal as frivolous, has involved and stifled mind in matter. The butterfly could not unfold his wings of fair and various colors; he was forced to lay them off and to change into a stupid and filthy worm, entangled in a covering as loathsome and unclean as itself. In this consisted progress. The limit of ideological perfection was to deny ideas; that of metaphysical studies, to deny spirits; that of morals, to deny morality; that of society, to deny authority; that of politics, to establish license; that of religion, to deny God. Thus, human reason, thinking to advance, marched in a retrograde direction; and proposed to raise the edifice of its knowledge, when there was nothing left to demolish: thus they imagined to attain a scientific result by denying every thing, and by finally denying themselves. 6. At present, there is a reaction against so degrading a philosophy. We have only to open the writings of the philosophers of this age to convince ourselves of this consoling truth. We everywhere meet the word idea in contraposition to that of sensation; that of mind to that of matter; that of activity of thought to that of bodily motion; those of cause, order, liberty, of free will, morality, infinity. The ideas which accompany them are sometimes inexact, sometimes extravagant; but at the bottom of all this we distinguish an anxious desire to rise from the abyss down to which an atheistical and material philosophy had dragged the human mind. Some who have contributed to the reaction do not admit a free and intelligent God, distinct from the universe. What we have said above is therefore true, that pantheism is atheism in disguise; nevertheless, the atheism of the pantheist now-a-days is an atheism which is ashamed to confess itself such, and which sometimes, perhaps, deceives itself, being persuaded that it is not.