hands of Fichte,[12] the successor of Kant, who died but a few years since; there, again, the analysis of thought is given as the foundation of philosophy. Kant was so firmly established in the subject of knowledge, that he could scarcely go out of it--that, in fact, he never did legitimately go out of it. Fichte plunged into the subject of knowledge so deeply that he buried himself in it, and absorbed in the human _me_ all existences, as well as all sciences--sad shipwreck of analysis, which signalizes at once its greatest effort and its rock! The same spirit, therefore, governs all the schools of the eighteenth century; this century disdains arbitrary formulas; it has a horror for hypotheses, and attaches itself, or pretends to attach itself, to the observation of facts, and particularly to the analysis of thought. Let us acknowledge with freedom and with grief, that the eighteenth century applied analysis to all things without pity and without measure. It cited before its tribunal all doctrines, all sciences; neither the metaphysics of the preceding age, with their imposing systems, nor the arts with their prestige, nor the governments with their ancient authority, nor the religions with their majesty,--nothing found favor before it. Although it spied abysses at the bottom of what it called philosophy, it threw itself into them with a courage which is not without grandeur; for the grandeur of man is to prefer what he believes to be truth to himself. The eighteenth century let loose tempests. Humanity no more progressed, except over ruins. The world was again agitated in that state of disorder in which it had already been once seen, at the decline of the ancient beliefs, and before the triumphs of Christianity, when men wandered through all contraries, without power to rest anywhere, given up to every disquietude of spirit, to every misery of heart, fanatical and atheistical, mystical and incredulous, voluptuous and sanguinary.[13] But if the philosophy of the eighteenth century has left us a vacuity for an inheritance, it has also left us an energetic and fecund love of truth. The eighteenth century was the age of criticism and destructions; the nineteenth should be that of intelligent rehabilitations. It belongs to it to find in a profounder analysis of thought the principles of the future, and with so many remains to raise, in fine, an edifice that reason may be able to acknowledge.