By way of amends, however, for these remarks, M. Jouffroy makes an immense concession to the systematic skepticism which declares the human mind incapable of knowing things as they really are in themselves, for he admits this skepticism to be rationally legitimate; "the foundation of all belief," says he, "is an act of faith, blind but irresistible. In effect there is no contradiction between faith and skepticism; for man believes by instinct and doubts by reason. ... Skeptics fall into no contradiction when, in the practice of life, they believe their senses, their consciousness, their memory, and when they act in consequence; they obey the laws of their instinctive nature by so believing, and they obey their rational natures by confessing that their beliefs are illegitimate. {353} So we equally excuse humanity which believes, and skepticism which doubts; but we cannot equally excuse the philosophers who have combated skepticism by striving to demonstrate the rational legitimacy of human belief. When men affirm that mankind believes, and that skeptics do so with mankind, they affirm a fact in itself incontestable; when they add that mankind believes itself right in believing, that is to say, virtually admits that the human intelligence sees things as they are, this is true too, and skeptics do not deny it; but when, grappling with skepticism itself, men pretend to show that the human intelligence really sees things as they are, this is a pretension which I cannot understand. What! do they not perceive that this pretension is nothing less than the pretension of demonstrating the human intelligence by the human intelligence, which has been, is, and will be eternally impossible? We believe skepticism forever invincible, because we regard skepticism as the final word of the reason concerning the reason itself." [Footnote 77] [Footnote 77: Mélanges philosophique, pp. 238-240.] {354} I do not agree with M. Jouffroy in his disdain for experimental and practical skepticism. This is not, it is true, a system which philosophers are called upon to refute, but a fact which ought to occupy an important place with them, for by showing to us how incomplete human science is, and human error how frequent, it sets us on our guard against all presumptuous confidence in our own ideas, and against intolerance toward the ideas of others--two of the most dangerous infirmities to which human intelligence and society are liable. But as for the reasoning which impels M. Jouffroy to accept the systematic and definitive skepticism as to the intrinsic reality of things, I repudiate it altogether. If that were, as he says, "the final word of the reason respecting the reason itself," it would be the negation, or to use a better expression, the suicide, of man's reason and of the human intelligence. {355}