127. In the first place, this doctrine is in contradiction to common sense, and is rejected with irresistible force by the internal sense of every man. The sentiment of our existence is always accompanied by the sentiment of our distinction from other beings like us. We are not only certain that we exist, but that we are distinct from others; and if in any thing the sentiment of this distinction is profoundly marked, it is in what regards the phenomena of our consciousness. Never at any time, in any country or phase of society, could men be persuaded that the consciousness of all their acts and impressions belonged to one and the same being in which individual consciousnesses were united. It is a bad philosophy which begins by struggling against humanity, and placing itself in open contradiction to an irresistible sentiment of nature. 128. The very idea of consciousness excludes this monstrous absurdity, which attempts to transform individual consciousnesses into modifications of one universal consciousness. Consciousness, that is, the internal sentiment of what a being experiences, is essentially individual, it is, so to speak, incommunicable to every other. To others we communicate the knowledge of our consciousness, but not our consciousness itself. It is an intuition or a sentiment which is completed in the innermost recesses of our being, in that which is most our own. What, then, would that consciousness be which does not belong to us as individuals, which is not our own which is nothing of what we believe it to be, but only a property of an unknown being,--a being of which we have no knowledge, and of which we are only a phenomenon, a passing modification? Where would be the unity of consciousness in the midst of such diversity, opposition, and mutual exclusion? This being, modified by so many consciousnesses, would have no consciousness of its own, for it could give itself no account of what it experiences. CHAPTER XVIII. FICHTE'S PANTHEISTIC SYSTEM. 129. I am going to fulfil a promise made in the beginning of this work,[51] to explain and refute the system of Fichte. We have seen the cabalistic forms employed by the German philosopher to obtain a simple result, which amounted to neither more nor less than Descartes' principle, "I think, therefore, I am." The reader could never imagine that any one should attempt to found pantheism on this fact of consciousness, and that the human mind, because it finds itself, should have the arrogance to maintain that nothing exists beside itself, that whatever there is, proceeds from itself, and what is still more extraordinary, that it is itself produced by itself. In order to believe that such things have been written we have to see them, and therefore in explaining Fichte's system, I shall copy his own words. [51] See Bk. I., Chap. VII.