We respond, going directly to the root of the difficulty:--it is not true that all our judgments are negative. We admit that in the reflective state every affirmative judgment supposes a negative judgment, and reciprocally. But is reason exercised only on the condition of reflection? Is there not a primitive affirmation which implies no negation? As we often act without deliberating on our action, without premeditating it, and as we manifest in this case an activity that is free still, but free with a liberty that is not reflective; so reason often perceives the truth without traversing doubt or error. Reflection is a return to consciousness, or to an operation wholly different from it. We do not find, then, in any primitive fact, that every judgment which contains it presupposes another in which it is not. We thus arrive at a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition, the legitimate child of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet. Such is the first act of the faculty of knowing. If one contradicts this primitive affirmation, the faculty of knowing falls back up upon itself, examines itself, attempts to call in doubt the truth it has perceived; it cannot; it affirms anew what it had affirmed at first; it adheres to the truth already recognized, but with a new sentiment, the sentiment that it is not in its power to divest itself of the evidence of this same truth; then, but only then, appears that character of necessity and subjectivity that some would turn against the truth, as though truth could lose its own value, while penetrating deeper into the mind and there triumphing over doubt; as though reflective evidence of it were the less evidence; as though, moreover, the necessary conception of it were the only form, the primary form of the perception of truth. The skepticism of Kant, to which good sense so easily does justice, is driven to the extreme and forced within its intrenchment by the distinction between spontaneous reason and reflective reason. Reflection is the theatre of the combats which reason engages in with itself, with doubt, sophism, and error. But above reflection is a sphere of light and peace, where reason perceives truth without returning on itself, for the sole reason that truth is truth, and because God has made the reason to perceive it, as he has made the eye to see and the ear to hear.