"Intellectual life is an uninterrupted succession, not merely of ideas, but of beliefs, explicit or implicit. The beliefs of the mind are the force of the soul and the moving incentives of the will. Whatever determines us to believe we call _evidence_. ... Reason renders no account of what is evident; to condemn it to do so is to annihilate it, for it also has need of an evidence peculiar to itself. {361} Did not reasoning rest upon principles anterior to the reason, analysis would be without end, and synthesis without commencement. The fundamental laws of belief constitute the intelligence itself; and as those laws all flow from the same source, they have the same authority; they judge by the same right; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of another. Whoever revolts against any single one of these laws, revolts against them all, and so abdicates all his nature. Are there weapons of legitimate use against that faculty by which we perceive the external world? These same weapons may be turned against the conscience, the memory, the moral sense, against reason itself. ... Let but, in any single point, the nature of knowledge--the nature, I say, and not the degree--be made subordinate to our means of knowing, and all certitude is at an end; nothing is true, nothing is false. But it is not enough to say this; for all is true and false altogether, since truth and falsehood no longer differ from sweet and bitter. {362} The void itself is then deprived of its absolute nullity: it enters into the domain of the relative; it is something, nothing, according to the conformation of the spectator's eye. The useful is the sole subject that the understanding contemplates, the sole subject for which the heart has to make its laws. A legislation capricious and without efficacy, which applies only shifting rules to actions, and which has none for the intentions and for the desires. This is not mere declamation; all these consequences have been deduced from skeptical doctrines with an exactitude leaving nothing to be either desired or contested. It is then a fact that public and private morality, the order of society and the happiness of individuals, are directly at stake in the controversy between true philosophy and false philosophy respecting the reality of knowledge. For when existences themselves become problems, what force remains to the bond that unites them? We cannot divide the entire man; we cannot assign a part only to skepticism; as soon as skepticism once penetrates into the understanding it invades it throughout." [Footnote 78] [Footnote 78: Fragments de M. Royer-Collard, in the works of Reid, translation of M. Jouffroy, vol. iv, pp. 426-451.] {363}