mind of its existence; for it amounts to the same thing, to deny that it is a substance. It makes one indignant to see a philosopher pretend, by such an absurd confusion, to attack one of the clearest, most evident, and most irresistible arguments which can be presented to human reason. I thought yesterday, I think to-day: in all the variety of my situations, I find myself the same and not another; this reality, which remains identical in the midst of diversity, I call my soul; therefore my soul is a permanent reality, the subject of modifications; therefore it is a substance. Can any thing be clearer?" [45] Critik der reinen Vernunft, p. 298. 56. Psychology does, it is true, make use of the general idea of substance in proving the substantiality of the soul: but it appeals to a fact of experience, to the testimony of consciousness, in order to apply this idea to the present case. What does Kant mean when he pretends to have demonstrated that the conception of a thing which can exist of itself as subject, but not as mere attribute, does not involve any objective reality? When he speaks of _subject_, does he mean a real subject, the subject of modifications? Then the soul is a subject; but we do not say that it is a subject _only_; we conceive its reality under this aspect without, therefore, denying that it has other characters: on the contrary, we expressly acknowledge that it is an active principle, which implies something more that the mere subject of modifications, for this last is a passive, rather than an active, quality. If by subject Kant understands the logical subject, we deny that this is exclusively the character of the soul in such a way that it cannot logically be the attribute or predicate of a proposition. 57. "The conception of a thing," says Kant, "which can exist as its own subject, but not as a mere predicate, draws with it no objective reality; that is, one cannot know whether any object corresponds to it, since one cannot conceive the possibility of such a manner of existing, consequently there is absolutely no cognition. In order that it may indicate under the denomination of substance, an object which may be given, in order that it may be a cognition, a constant intuition must be placed at the foundation, as the indispensable condition of the objective reality of a conception, namely, that by which alone the object is given. But we have nothing constant in the internal intuition, for the _me_ is only the consciousness of my thought; if, therefore, we confine ourselves to the thought alone, the necessary condition of the application of the conception of substance, that is, of a subject subsisting in itself as thinking being."[46] [46] Critik der reinen Vernunft, p. 299.