The philosophers, who have admitted the existence of these universal and necessary principles, have assigned them different names, and have enumerated and classified them differently; but whether they style them "ideas," or "innate ideas," or "laws," or "forms," or "categories of the understanding"--whether they enlarge or limit their number--they agree as to their nature, and declare them inherent in the human mind itself, which applies them, so to say, as its own peculiar property in its appreciation of the external world; so far is the mind from borrowing them from that world! {236} These universal and necessary principles once admitted and characterized, some of the philosophers who so admit and characterize them, the Scotch philosophers for instance, go no further, and adhere to the psychological fact without examining its value or its consequences in an ontological sense. Others, like Kant, refuse to that psychological fact all ontological value, and are of opinion that nothing authorizes us in affirming that those principles, inherent in the internal existence of the human mind, are true in the domain beyond the human mind, or that they regulate the realities of the external world, as they regulate our intellectual activity. {237} Others, finally, M. Cousin, with Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Fénélon, and Bossuet, see the work of God, and consequently God himself, in the universal and necessary principles which preside over the intellectual existence of man; and they recognize God as the infinite and sovereign being in whom the necessary principles reside; and they regard these as the manifestations of him, and think that he placed them in the intelligence of man when he placed man himself in the middle of the world.