We cannot recollect too well, for the sake of others and ourselves, that the primitive state of human cognitions is remote from us; we can scarcely bring it within the reach of our vision and submit it to observation; the actual state, on the contrary, is always at our disposal: it is sufficient for us to enter into ourselves, to fathom consciousness by reflection, and make it give up what it contains. Setting out from certain facts, we shall not be liable to wander subsequently into hypotheses, or if, in ascending to the primitive state, we fall into any error, we shall be able to perceive it and repair it by the aid of the truth which an impartial observation shall have given us; every origin which shall not legitimately end at the point where we are, is by that alone convicted of being false, and will deserve to be discarded.[28] You know that a large portion of the last year was spent upon this question. We took, one by one, universal and necessary questions submitted to our examination, in order to determine the origin of each one of them, its primitive form, and the different forms which have successively clothed it; only after having operated thus upon a sufficiently large number of principles, did we come slowly to a general conclusion, and that conclusion we believe ourselves entitled to express here briefly as the solid result of a most circumspect analysis, and, at least, a most methodical labor. We must either renew before you this labor, this analysis, and thereby run the risk of not being able to complete the long course that we have marked out for ourselves, or we must limit ourselves to reminding you of the essential traits of the theory at which we arrived. This theory, moreover, is in itself so simple, that, without the dress of regular demonstrations upon which it is founded, its own evidence will sufficiently establish it. It wholly rests upon the distinction between the different forms under which truth is presented to us. It is, in its somewhat arid generality, as follows: 1st. One can perceive truth in two different ways. Sometimes one perceives it in such or such a particular circumstance. For example, in presence of two apples or two stones, and of two other similar objects placed by the side of the first, I perceive this truth with absolute certainty, viz., that these two stones and these two other stones make four stones,--which is in some sort a concrete apperception of the truth, because the truth is given to us in regard to real and determinate objects. Sometimes I also affirm in a general manner that two and two equal four, abstracting every determinate object,--which is the abstract conception of truth.