grasp of our sensibility and our imagination the august and sublime notion that confounds all created substance? This is what we are taught by all metaphysic doctrine whatever, and not only by that of Kant, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fénelon: all alike teach us that the senses are but a confused and relative knowledge, that space and time are modes of finite existence, that God can only be conceived of by analogy, and not in His essence. Are such conceptions as these very different from those of Kant? And if he has taken them up again under another form, if by isolating he has exaggerated them, his is the merit of having brought them into prominence, of reminding us of them, and forcing us to assign them a more important place in our doctrines. Despite the warnings of the greatest minds, and of all great minds, are we not ceaselessly tempted to yield to the automatic instinct which makes us believe things to be as we see them, makes us suppose the existence of a matter, solid, coloured, sonorous, cold, or hot, such as the senses acquaint us with; makes us believe in an absolute space and time, with which we no longer know how to deal when we think of the true Absolute; makes us conceive of this true Absolute or Goodness as of a species of great man, that we strip of a body, without even reflecting whether we have really the power of representing to ourselves anything absolutely incorporeal? It is against this vulgar current dogmatism, which philosophy has so much trouble in getting rid of, that not only Kant, but every metaphysician, protests. Kant only expounded, under a rigorous and systematic form, all the critical portion of previous metaphysics. To us it seems impossible--with more or less reservation, and without insisting at present too rigidly on the share of the relative and subjective in human knowledge--impossible, we say, not to allow this share, and consequently, in a certain measure, not to give in our adherence to transcendental criticism and idealism. There is, however, as we have seen above, something which escapes from this relativity of all human knowledge: it is the very fact of knowing. This fact has in itself something absolute. I know not whence it comes, I cannot explain it; I marvel that a being should be met with in whom at one time or other what we call knowledge has appeared; but this fact cannot exist without being known by the knower. All knowledge supposes, then, a subject that knows itself--that is to say, who is internally present to himself. Here knowledge comes from within, not from without. Whatever is objective can only _appear_ to me, and is consequently a _phenomenon_. I only see its outside, and it is only in relation to myself that I can grasp even that outside. But the conscious _ego_ sees itself from within. Shall we say that it appears to itself? I am willing to say so, but as it appears to itself that appearance is a reality, for the form that I give it is my