[95] One was then ardently occupied with magnetism, and more than a magnetizer, half a materialist, half a visionary, pretended to convert us to a system of perfect clairvoyance of soul, obtained by means of artificial sleep. Alas! the same follies are now renewed. Conjunctions are the fashion. Spirits are interrogated, and they respond! Only let there be consciousness that one does not interrogate, and superstition alone counterpoises skepticism. PART SECOND THE BEAUTIFUL. LECTURE VI. THE BEAUTIFUL IN THE MIND OF MAN. The method that must govern researches on the beautiful and art is, as in the investigation of the true, to commence by psychology.--Faculties of the soul that unite in the perception of the beautiful.--The senses give only the agreeable; reason alone gives the idea of the beautiful.--Refutation of empiricism, that confounds the agreeable and the beautiful.--Pre-eminence of reason.--Sentiment of the beautiful; different from sensation and desire.--Distinction between the sentiment of the beautiful and that of the sublime.--Imagination.--Influence of sentiment on imagination.--Influence of imagination on sentiment.--Theory of taste. Let us recall in a few words the results at which we have arrived. Two exclusive schools are opposed to each other in the eighteenth century; we have combated both, and each by the other. To empiricism we have opposed the insufficiency of sensation, and its own inevitable necessity to idealism. We have admitted, with Locke and Condillac, in regard to the origin of knowledge, particular and contingent ideas, which we owe to the senses and consciousness; and above the senses and consciousness, the direct sources of all particular ideas, we have recognized, with Reid and Kant, a special faculty, different from sensation and consciousness, but developed with them,--reason, the lofty source of universal and necessary truths. We have established, against Kant, the absolute authority of reason, and the truths which it discovers. Then, the truths that reason revealed to us have themselves revealed to us their eternal principle,--God. Finally, this rational spiritualism, which is both the faith of the human race and the doctrine of the greatest minds of antiquity and modern times, we have carefully distinguished from a chimerical and dangerous mysticism. Thus the necessity of experience and the necessity of reason, the necessity of a real and infinite being which is the first and last foundation of truth, a severe distinction between spiritualism and mysticism, are the great principles which we have been able to gather from the first part of this course. The second part, the study of the beautiful, will give us the same results elucidated and aggrandized by a new application.