themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets. {321} They see not that their key is a deception, that at each step facts evident, indestructible, give the flattest denial to their inferences, and that to maintain their arbitrary and insufficient principle they are forced to ignore and to deny other facts, themselves evident, indestructible. Psychological observation proves and irresistibly establishes three facts, however the consequences of these facts themselves may lead to questions and controversies. 1. Man believes in his own existence, and in his own personality. He feels himself and perceives himself to be a being, real and distinct from every other being. 2. Man feels himself and knows himself to be a free agent. Of the freedom of his resolves, whatever the motives and deliberations which precede them, man has an intimate and assured consciousness. 3. Good and evil exist in man, and exist in the world; moral good and evil as well as physical good and evil. Whatever may be thought of their origin, the mixture and the struggle of good and of evil, in the moral order and in the physical order, are facts evident in themselves, and attested by the conscience and by the experience of the human race. {322} Pantheism sometimes ignores and omits, sometimes formally denies, these facts, which psychology attests and proves. There is, however, a notable difference in this point in the three great representatives of Pantheism. Thanks to the Platonic school, from which he sprang, Plotinus, in treating the different questions of man's liberty and of the reality of good and of evil, soars in an elevated region where the truth now shines in splendor, now obscures itself and disappears in the labyrinth in which the philosopher himself is entangled as soon as he attempts to explain the one and infinite Being and that Being's relations with nature and with man. Spinoza is more consequent and plainer. He formally denies all individuality, all human liberty. Substance, "_the being_" is single and universal. {323} All act of man, as every fact of nature, is produced by fated laws and causes: "Free will is a chimera, flattering to our pride and in reality founded upon our ignorance. All that I can say to those who believe that they can, by virtue of any free decision of the soul, speak or be silent--or, to use a single word, act--is that they dream with their eyes open." [Footnote 66] [Footnote 66: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. E. Saisset, vol. i, Introduction, p. clii.]