I retrench nothing, change nothing in these remarkable words that express so energetically the conclusions of the common sense of mankind. I would only render them still more complete, by illustrating in its primitive and indestructible unity the fact upon which they are founded. "We cannot divide man," says M. Royer-Collard. Here is precisely the risk that philosophical science incurs, and to which it too often succumbs. It divides man in order to study him; and after having so studied him, when it seeks to deduce from its laborious operation what man in his complete and living reality is, we find the result a strange misapprehension, because science has neglected to re-establish the unity which it broke. {364} It puts together, it is true, the scattered members, but the being itself has disappeared; and then it is that philosophers know not how to solve the problems or to extricate themselves from the doubts by which they are confronted. Entire, living, one, the human being explained himself; mutilated and severed into distinct parts, that being loses all power and falls into obscurity. What is sensation, what perception, judgment, reasoning, reason, will, consciousness? They are the human being, feeling, perceiving, judging, reasoning, willing, and observing what is passing within him. This is no troop of actors playing, each his part, in a complex drama; but a being single and alive, actor and sole spectator in the drama of his proper life. What is this one and single being doing when he feels, perceives, judges, reasons, wills, and watches what is occurring within himself? He is taking cognizance at once of himself, and what is not himself. {365} His own existence and the existence of that which is not himself, reveal themselves to him from the very first in those diverse facts and acts which philosophical science discriminates, and calls by the particular names of sensation, perception, judgment, reason, will, consciousness. The primitive and essential fact at the root of all, is the fact itself of the cognizance which man takes of himself, and of what is not himself. A cognizance, at first confused, and always incomplete, but at the same time direct and certain. Not by way of deduction, nor as a mere appearance, but by way of immediate intuition, and as a positive reality, does the human being become aware of his own existence and of that existence which is not his. This fact is lost sight of, or at least is not characterized exactly and as it is in itself, when it is said that man believes naturally and inevitably in his own existence, and in that of the external world. This is a very different thing from _belief:_ it is _knowledge_ itself of that double reality, internal and external, called by the name of Man and World. {366} Philosophers ignore, and they change the nature of this fact, when, merely playing with verbal distinctions and reasonings, they condemn the human mind not to issue forth from itself, when