In fact, when we are speaking of the truth of universal and necessary principles, we do not believe they are true only for us:--we believe them to be true in themselves, and still true, were there no minds of ours to conceive them. We regard them as independent of us; they seem to us to impose themselves upon our intelligence by the force of the truth that is in them. So, in order to express faithfully what passes within us, it would be necessary to reverse the proposition of Kant, and instead of saying with him, that these principles are the necessary laws of our mind, therefore they have no absolute value out of mind; we should much rather say, that these principles have an absolute value in themselves, therefore we cannot but believe them. And even this necessity of belief with which the new skepticism arms itself, is not the indispensable condition of the application of principles. We have established[38] that the necessity of believing supposes reflection, examination, an effort to deny and the want of power to do it; but before all reflection, intelligence spontaneously seizes the truth, and, in the spontaneous apperception, is not the sentiment of necessity, nor consequently that character of subjectivity of which the German school speaks so much. Let us, then, here recur to that spontaneous intuition of truth, which Kant knew not, in the circle where his profoundly reflective and somewhat scholastic habits held him captive. Is it true that there is no judgment, even affirmative in form, which is not mixed with negation? It seems indeed that every affirmative judgment is at the same time negative; in fact, to affirm that a thing exists, is to deny its non-existence; as every negative judgment is at the same time affirmative; for to deny the existence of a thing, is to affirm its non-existence. If it is so, then every judgment, whatever may be its form, affirmative or negative, since these two forms come back to each other, supposes a pre-established doubt in regard to the existence of the thing in question, supposes some exercise of reflection, in the course of which the mind feels itself constrained to bear such or such a judgment, so that at this point of view the foundation of the judgment seems to be in its necessity; and then recurs the celebrated objection:--if you judge thus only because it is impossible for you not to do it, you have for a guaranty of the truth nothing but yourself and your own ways of conceiving; it is the human mind that transports its laws out of itself; it is the subject that makes the object out of its own image, without ever going beyond the inclosure of subjectivity.