Chap. iv., sect. 49. "... My ideas are myself; for they are my reason.... My ideas, and the basis of myself, or of my mind, appear but the same thing. On the other hand, my mind is changing, uncertain, ignorant, subject to error, precipitate in its judgments, accustomed to believe what it does not clearly understand, and to judge without having sufficiently consulted its ideas, which are by themselves certain and immutable. My ideas, then, are not myself, and I am not my ideas. What shall I believe, then, they can be?... What then! are my ideas God? They are superior to my mind, since they rectify and correct it; they have the character of the Divinity, for they are universal and immutable like God; they really subsist, according to a principle that we have already established: nothing exists so really as that which is universal and immutable. If that which is changing, transitory, and derived, truly exists, much more does that which cannot change, and is necessary. It is then necessary to find in nature something existing and real, that is, my ideas, something that is within me, and is not myself, that is superior to me, that is in me even when I am not thinking of it, with which I believe myself to be alone, as though I were only with myself, in fine, that is more present to me, and more intimate than my own foundation. I know not what this something, so admirable, so familiar, so unknown, can be, except God." Let us now hear the most solid, the most authoritative of the Christian doctors of the seventeenth century--let us hear Bossuet in his _Logic_, and in the _Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Self_.[63] Bossuet may be said to have had three masters in philosophy--St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Descartes. He had been taught at the college of Navarre the doctrine of St. Thomas, that is to say, a modified peripateticism; at the same time he was nourished by the reading of St. Augustine, and out of the schools he found spread abroad the philosophy of Descartes. He adopted it, and had no difficulty in reconciling it with that of St. Augustine, while, upon more than one point, it corroborated the doctrine of St. Thomas. Bossuet invented nothing in philosophy; he received every thing, but every thing united and purified, thanks to that supreme good sense which in him is a quality predominating over force, grandeur, and eloquence.[64] In the passages which I am about to exhibit to you, which I hope you will impress upon your memories, you will not find the grace of Malebranche, the exhaustless abundance of Fenelon; you will find what is better than either, to wit, clearness and precision--all the rest in him is in some sort an addition to these.