"While we regard as conclusive Kant's analysis of Time and Space into conditions of thought, we cannot help viewing his deduction of the 'Categories of Understanding' and the 'Ideas of Speculative Reason' as the work of a great but perverse ingenuity. The categories of understanding are merely subordinate forms of the conditioned. Why not, therefore, generalize the _Conditioned--Existence Conditioned_, as the supreme category, or categories, of thought?--and if it were necessary to analyze this form into its subaltern applications, why not develop these immediately out of the generic principle, instead of preposterously, and by a forced and partial analogy, deducing the laws of the understanding from a questionable division of logical proposition? Why distinguish Reason (Vernunft) from Understanding (Verstand), simply on the ground that the former is conversant about, or rather tends toward, the unconditioned; when it is sufficiently apparent, that the unconditioned is conceived as the negation of the conditioned, and also that the conception of contradictories is one? In the Kantian philosophy, both faculties perform the same function, both seek the one in the many;--the Idea (Idee) is only the Concept (Begriff) sublimated into the inconceivable; Reason only the Understanding which has 'overleaped itself.'" Not stopping now to correct the entirely erroneous statement that "both faculties," _i. e._, Understanding and Reason, "perform the same function," we are to notice the two leading points which are made, viz.:--1. That there is no distinction between the Understanding and the Reason; or, in other words, there is no such faculty as the Reason is claimed to be, there is none but the Understanding; and, 2. A generalization is the highest form of human knowledge; both of which may be comprised in one affirmation; the Understanding is the highest faculty of knowledge belonging to the human soul. Upon this, a class of thinkers, following Plato and Kant, take issue with the logician, and assert that the distinction between the two faculties named above, has a substantial basis; that, in fact, they are different in _kind_, and that the mode of activity in the one is wholly unlike the mode of activity in the other. Thus, then, is the great issue between the Hamiltonian and Platonic schools made upon a question of _fact_. He who would attack the former school successfully, must aim his blow straight at their fundamental assumption; and he who shall establish the fact of the Pure Reason as an unquestionable faculty in the human soul, will, in such establishment, accomplish the destruction of the Hamiltonian system of philosophy. Believing this system to be thoroughly vicious in its tendencies; being such indeed, as would, if carried out, undermine the whole Christian religion; and what is of equal importance, being false to the facts in man's soul as God's creature, the writer will attempt to