Empiricism owes the greater part of its influence upon the minds of many to its continual appeal to reality and facts. This leads to the belief that speculative philosophy wishes to neglect reality and facts and to build, as the saying is, upon clouds. But we have here an ambiguity and a sophism with which we must not allow ourselves to be deceived. Not only does speculative philosophy also base itself upon facts and have the phenomenal world as its point of departure; but speculative philosophy truly founds itself upon facts and empiricism does not. The first considers facts in their infinite variety and in their continuous development; the second, a certain number of facts, collected at certain epochs and among certain peoples, or at all epochs and among all peoples empirically known; chat is to say, it considers a limited number of facts. Speculative philosophy, presupposing the pure phenomenon, transforms it into (historical) fact and is a true _philosophy of fact_; empiricism, without being aware of it, presupposes the facts that it accepts, which are already, though with little criticism, historically ascertained and interpreted. This unconsciousness of what it is doing makes its condition worse, so that it can give nothing but _a philosophy of classifications,_ which are taken for facts only through habitual lack of reflection. Speculative philosophy, therefore, can answer the claim and the boast of empiricism that it is based upon facts, by accepting the claim but denying the boast, as one to which empiricism has and can have no right, and by appropriating this achievement to itself. [Sidenote: _Bankruptcy of empiricism: dualism, agnosticism, spiritualism and superstition._]