Let us comprehend well the import of this new discussion. The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions,--have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. If it is not absolutely true that every quality has its subject of inherence, it is not, then, certain, that we have a soul, a real substance of all the qualities which consciousness attests. If the principle of causality is only a law of our mind, the external world, which this principle discovers to us, loses its reality, it is only a succession of phenomena, without any effective action over each other, as Hume would have it, and even the impressions of our senses are destitute of causes. Matter exists no more than the soul. Nothing exists; every thing is reduced to mobile appearances, given up to a perpetual becoming, which again is accomplished we know not where, since in reality there is neither time nor space. Since the principle of sufficient reason only serves to put in motion human curiosity, once in possession of the fatal secret that it can attain nothing real, this curiosity would be very good to weary itself in searching for reasons which inevitably escape it, and in discovering relations which correspond only to the wants of our mind, and do not in the least correspond to the nature of things. In fine, if the principle of causality, of substances, of final causes, of sufficient reason, are only our modes of conception, God, whom all these principles reveal to us, will no more be any thing but the last of chimeras, which vanishes with all the others in the breath of the Critique. Kant has established, as well as Reid and ourself, the existence of universal and necessary principles; but an involuntary disciple of his century, an unconscious servant of the empirical school, to which he places himself in the attitude of an adversary, he makes to it the immense concession that these principles are applied only to the impressions of sensibility, that their part is to put these impressions in a certain order, but that beyond these impressions, beyond experience, their power expires. This concession has ruined the whole enterprise of the German philosopher.