"The defect or error of M. Cousin on this point was in failing, as we have already observed, to identify the absolute or necessary ideas he detects and asserts with God, the only _ens necessarium et reale_, and in failing to assert them in their objectivity to the whole subject, and in presenting them only as objective to the human personality. He never succeeded in cutting himself wholly loose from the German nonsense of a subjective-object or objective-subject, and when he had clearly proved an idea to be objective to the reflective reason and the human personality, he did not dare assert it to be objective in relation to the whole subject. It was impersonal, but might be in a certain sense subjective, as Kant maintained with regard to the categories." (_Catholic World_, PP. 335, 336.) The reviewer, after snubbing us for our ignorance and ineptness, which are very great, as we are well aware and humbly confess, replies to us in this manner: "And yet nothing in Cousin is clearer or more positive than that this 'pure and sublime degree of the reason, when will, reflection, and personality are as yet absent'--this 'intuition and spontaneous revelation, which is the primitive mode of reason'--is objective to the whole subject in every _possible_ sense, and is, consequently, conformed to the objective, and a revelation of it. "Can the critic have read Cousin's Lectures on Kant, 'thirty or thirty-five years ago'? If so, we advise him to refresh his memory by a re-perusal, and perhaps he may withdraw the strange assertion that Cousin held an 'absolute idea to be impersonal, but that it might be in a certain sense subjective, _as Kant maintained with regard to the categories_.' 'The scepticism of Kant,' says Cousin, [Footnote 33] 'rests on his finding the laws of the reason to be subjective, personal to man; but here is a mode of the reason where these same laws are, as it were, deprived of all subjectivity--where the reason shows itself almost entirely impersonal. {99} "How the critic would wish this impersonal activity to be objective to the 'whole subject,' and not to the 'personal only,' as if there was any greater degree of objectivity in one case than in the other, it is not easy to see. It looks like a distinction without a difference. The abstract and logical distinction is apparent, but though distinct, the 'whole subject,' and the 'human personality,' cannot be separated, so that what is objective to one, shall not be so to the other also. The 'whole subject' is, simply, the thinking, feeling, willing being, which we are, as distinguished from the world external to us. If an idea, then, is revealed to us by what is completely foreign to us--if an act of the reason is spontaneous and unreflective, +hat is, impersonal--what is there that can be more objective to the subject?