86. But, divesting himself thus of all belief in what the world deemed most unquestionable, plunged in an abyss, as it seemed for a time, he soon found his feet on a rock, from which he sprang upwards to an unclouded sun. Doubting all things, abandoning all things, he came to the question, what is it that doubts and denies? Something it must be; he might be deceived by a superior power, but it was he that was deceived. He felt his own existence; the proof of it was that he did feel it; that he had affirmed, that he now doubted, in a word, that he was a thinking substance. _Cogito: Ergo sum_--this famous enthymem of the Cartesian philosophy veiled in rather formal language, that which was to him, and must be to us all, the eternal basis of conviction, which no argument can strengthen, which no sophistry can impair, the consciousness of a self within, a percipient indivisible Ego.[229] The only proof of this is that it admits of no proof, that no man can pretend to doubt of his own existence with sincerity, or to express a doubt without absurd and inconsistent language. [229] This word, introduced by the Germans, or originally perhaps by the old Cartesians, is rather awkward, but far less so than the English pronoun I, which is also equivocal in sound. Stewart has adopted it as the lesser evil, and it seems reasonable not to scruple a word so convenient, if not necessary, to express the unity of the conscious principle. If it had been employed earlier, I am apt to think that some great metaphysical extravagances would have been avoided, and some fundamental truths more clearly apprehended. Fichte is well known to have made the grand division of _Ich_ and _Nicht Ich_, _Ego_ and _Non Ego_, the basis of his philosophy; in other words, the difference of subjective and objective reality. |His mind.| |Not sceptical.| 87. The scepticism of Descartes, it appears, which is merely provisional, is not at all similar to that of the Pyrrhonists, though some of his arguments may have been shafts from their quiver. Nor did he make use, which is somewhat remarkable, of the reasonings afterwards employed by Berkley against the material world, though no one more frequently distinguished than Descartes between the objective reality, as it was then supposed to be, of ideas in the mind, and the external or sensible reality of things. Scepticism, in fact, was so far from being characteristic of his disposition, that his errors sprang chiefly from the opposite source, little as he was aware of it, from an undue positiveness in theories which he could not demonstrate, or even render highly probable.[230]