This enterprise was at once honest and great. Kant, grieved at the skepticism of his times, proposed to arrest it by fairly meeting it. He thought to disarm Hume by conceding to him that our highest conceptions do not extend themselves beyond the inclosure of the human mind; and at the same time, he supposed that he had sufficiently vindicated the human mind by restoring to it the universal and necessary principles which direct it. But, according to the strong expression of M. Royer-Collard, "one does not encounter skepticism,--as soon as he has penetrated into the human understanding he has completely taken it by storm." A severe circumspection is one thing, skepticism is another. Doubt is not only permitted, it is commanded by reason itself in the employment and legitimate applications of our different faculties; but when it is applied to the legitimacy itself of our faculties, it no longer elucidates reason, it overwhelms it. In fact, with what would you have reason defend herself, when she has called herself in question? Kant himself, then, overturned the dogmatism which he proposed at once to restrain and save, at least in morals, and he put German philosophy upon a route, at the end of which was an abyss. In vain has this great man--for his intentions and his character, without speaking of his genius, merit for him this name--undertaken with Hume an ingenious and learned controversy; he has been vanquished in this controversy, and Hume remains master of the field of battle. What matters it, in fact, whether there may or may not be in the human mind universal and necessary principles, if these principles only serve to classify our sensations, and to make us ascend, step by step, to ideas that are most sublime, but have for ourselves no reality? The human mind is, then, as Kant himself well expressed it, like a banker who should take bills ranged in order on his desk for real values;--he possesses nothing but papers. We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself, at once triumphant and impotent, since it produces every thing, and produces only chimeras.[37] The reproach which a sound philosophy will content itself with making to Kant, is, that his system is not in accordance with facts. Philosophy can and must separate itself from the crowd for the explanation of facts; but, it cannot be too often repeated, it must not in the explanation destroy what it pretends to explain; otherwise it does not explain, it imagines. Here, the important fact which it is the question to explain is the belief of the human mind, and the system of Kant annihilates it.