Nor is M. Vacherot more of a Skeptic than of a Materialist and a Pantheist; he believes firmly in absolute truth, in scientific metaphysics, and in the universal and essential principles which form their bases. "Metaphysics," he says, "have nothing to dread from analysis; it is a test from which they can only issue with honor. The truths _à priori_ upon which the science rests, will inspire no more doubt so soon as it comes to be well understood that those truths are founded upon the ordinary principles of demonstration, like all the truths _à priori_ of the other sciences. {383} Metaphysics have, and will ever have for their object, the Being infinite, necessary, absolute, and universal. Now the ideas of being, infinite, necessary, absolute, universal, are so involved in the notion of appearance, finite, contingent, relative, individual, that it is impossible for the human mind to separate them. Accordingly, in order to be entitled to deny Metaphysics, and the truths which are peculiar to them, we must first mutilate the human mind, and reduce it to the pure faculties of sensation and imagination which are common to it with animals. From the moment when the reason, the thought, the faculty peculiar to the human intelligence, enters the field, it brings necessarily with it the object of sensation and of imagination, under the categories of quantity, quality, being, relation, unity. {384} Then it is that appear to the mind the distinction, and afterward the logical connection, of the two terms corresponding to each category, of the finite and the infinite, of the contingent and the necessary, of the individual and the universal, of the relative and the absolute, of appearance and being. The thought enters then perforce, whether it is conscious of it or not, upon the peculiar ground of Metaphysics. Nothing but a gross and, so to say, an animal empiricism, has the right to deny the conceptions and the truths of this science, and the denial is a denegation of the higher faculties of the intelligence." [Footnote 82] [Footnote 82: La Métaphysique et la science; Preface, vol. i, p. xlviii.] It is impossible to disavow more indignantly Materialism, Atheism, Skepticism, with their principles and their consequences. But after all these declarations and these disavowals, when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, and has to set the affirmation of his own ideas by the side of his criticism of the ideas of other writers; when he, in his turn, undertakes to explain God and the world, this twofold object of Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker becomes at once apparent, and he falls, in spite of himself, into the very paths from which he proposed to escape. {385}