they refuse to it the right to affirm as real, out of the mind and in itself, that which, in the mind and for the mind, the mind yet admits to be true. The human being may deceive himself, and often does deceive himself in such or such a special affirmation as to external realities; it has of them only a knowledge incomplete, and liable to error; but its general and permanent affirmation as to their existence is still folly justified and legitimate; it knows them as it knows itself, by the same proof and by the same natural process. M. Royer-Collard expresses admirably this great fact when he says: "The universe does not exist because we perceive it; but we perceive it because it exists. ... It needs not our presence; the absence of spectators would not make it languish away; it was before us, it will still be after us; its reality is independent of us: it is absolute." {367} Systematic skepticism is not, like Materialism and Pantheism, an hypothesis invented, although unsuccessfully invented, in order to solve the grand problem of soul and body, of finite and infinite; its error is not less considerable, although of a different character. It consists in a defective examination of the primitive fact of the human mind, and in the misapprehension of the nature and the import of that fact. This fact is by no means, as M. Jouffroy affirms, "a faith blind and irresistible," disavowed by rational science; it is really the natural knowledge, and the earliest knowledge acquired by the human being when it enters into activity; a knowledge, confused and incomplete, either of itself or of what is not itself; but still a knowledge direct and certain of the existence of itself, and of the existence of what is not itself. "Man believes by instinct and doubts by reason," adds M. Jouffroy; "skeptics obey the law of their instinctive nature when they believe, like the mass of mankind, in their senses, their consciousness, their memory, and when they act in consequence; so also they obey their rational nature when they confess that their beliefs are illegitimate." {368} This is strangely to _ignore_--I permit myself the use of this, here, incorrect expression--at once the reality of facts, and the value of words. What M. Jouffroy terms _instinct_, is the intuitive consciousness of internal reality and of external reality, and this consciousness the human being acquires directly by the complete and indivisible exercise of all his faculties; what he terms _reason_ is the result of the isolated operation of one of the faculties of the human being, who virtually forgets, when he decomposes himself for his own study, what he really is. Skepticism is not the "final word of the reason respecting the reason;" it is the suicide of the reason by a negation falsely termed scientific, of natural evidence, and of the common sense of mankind. --------------------------------------- {369} Eighth Meditation. Impiety, Recklessness, And Perplexity.