_Reader._ Then your labor is all in vain. For you must know that we do not base our demonstration of the substantiality and immortality of the soul on the doctrine of innate ideas, nor do we assume that the notion of a God is an “innate intuition.” Had you been even superficially acquainted with the works of our scholastic philosophers, you would have known that innate ideas are totally foreign to their psychological and theological doctrines. You would have known that the axiom, _Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu_—that is, “There is nothing in our intellect which has not entered by the gate of the senses”—is not a discovery of your Moleschott, to whom you attribute it, but is an old dictum familiar to all the schoolmen of past centuries, and approved by the most orthodox philosophers of our own time. Now, these philosophers, while denying that we have any innate idea, admit at the same time that our soul is a special substance and is immortal, and show that the human intellect can easily form a concept of God as a supreme cause, and ascertain his existence without need of innate intuitions. This might convince you that your chapter on innate ideas has no bearing on the questions concerning the nature of the soul and the notion of a God. Your assumption that if man has innate ideas, he will have a tendency “to shake off this earthly covering, and to return to his spiritual home,” is incorrect. For the human body has no spiritual home, as is evident; and the human soul, as having no previous existence in a separate state, has no home but in the body, and the presence of innate ideas would not create in it a tendency to shake off its earthly covering. On the other hand, your other assumption, that, if man has no innate ideas, he is “a production of the earth alone, and cannot be torn from the earth, with which he is inseparably connected both in his spiritual and bodily capacity,” is even more incorrect. For the absence of innate ideas does not mean, and does not entail, the absence of an intellectual principle; and such a principle, as evidently immaterial, is not a production of the earth, and has no need of earthly things to continue its existence.