contends, is to fall back from the pure or speculative reason on the practical reason, or the moral necessities of our nature, and yield to the moral imperative, which commands us to believe in God, nature, and duty. Kant has been followed by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who differ more or less from one another, but all follow the fundamental principle he asserted, and end in the doctrine of absolute identity of subject and object. "_Cogito, ergo sum_," said Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." "To think," used to say our old friend Bronson Alcott, "is to _thing_; to thing is to give or produce reality. My thought is creative: I think, therefore I am; I think God, therefore he is; nature, and therefore nature exists. I by thinking make them, that is, _thing_ them, render them real." No bad statement, as far as it goes, of the development Kant's doctrine received from his disciple Fichte. The only defect is that his later disciples, instead of making thought creative, have made it identical with the object. St. Anselm says: "I think most perfect being, therefore most perfect being is;" and so does Descartes, only Descartes substitutes God for most perfect being; but St. Anselm never said it in the sense that most perfect being is because I by my thought make it. Only a modern transcendentalist gone to seed could say that. The trouble with this whole scheme is that it puts me in the place of God, and makes me myself God, which I am quite sure I am not. It would be much more philosophical to say: I exist, therefore I think; I think being because it is, not that it is because I think it. Things do not exist because I think them, but I think them because they exist; they are not intelligible because I think them, but I think them because they are intelligible. Yet the germ of our friend Alcott's philosophy was in Kant's doctrine, which places the _forma_ of the thought in the subject instead of the object. Whether the categories, as given by Aristotle, are inexact, as Kant alleges, or whether, as given by Kant himself, they are reducible in number to two, as M. Cousin pretends, or to one, as Rosmini maintains, enters not into the present enquiry, which relates not to their number, but their objective reality. Kant in regard to philosophy has done simply what Reid did, only he has done it better or more scientifically. He has fully demonstrated that in every fact of experience there enters a non-empirical element, and, if he holds with Leibnitz that that element is the human understanding itself, he has still demonstrated that it is not an abstraction or generalization of the concrete qualities of the objects presented by experience.