We do not, therefore, consider it impossible to assign to the critical element its part in metaphysic without denying the objective reality of knowledge. We think that the famous old distinction between being and phenomena, the intelligible and the sensible, still endures, despite the "Kritik" of Kant; or rather, this very "Kritik" itself is, in our eyes, only a hyperbolical but striking manner of expressing this great truth. PAUL JANET. FOOTNOTES: [1] We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of the 19th October, 1873, under the title, "A New Phase of Spiritualism." We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school. [2] Hamilton's "Discussions: Cousin, Schelling." [3] Herbert Spencer's "First Principles," First Part p. 18. ON THE MORAL LIMITS OF BENEFICIAL COMMERCE. When a Professor of _Political Economy_ was first established in the University of Oxford, a controversy presently arose in the academical common rooms concerning the just meaning of the phrase. Among elder and conservative men, the most active-minded insisted that it ought to receive the full width of meaning attached to it by Aristotle in his Treatise on Economy, which, with him, was essentially the economy of the State--that is, in pure Greek, _political_ economy, although this epithet is not annexed to his title. By this interpretation, the science naturally and necessarily became implicated with moral considerations, which never can be excluded from the statesman's view. But the actual students and professors of the new science--eminently Mr. Nassau Senior and Dr. Whately, shortly afterwards Archbishop of Dublin--naturally feared that by such an interpretation political economy would become confounded with politics; would, indeed, cease to be a science; and by so great an enlargement of its area, would fail to receive that special and definite cultivation which Adam Smith had bestowed on it, as the theory of national wealth. Whately indeed, to avoid this inconvenient extension of the sense, proposed to call the topic, not political economy, but _Catallactics_--that is, the science of exchanges. Excellent in many respects as the last title was, it might have seemed to exclude the whole doctrine of taxation, and still more decisively all discussion of Malthus's theory of population, which belongs to politics or to morals, not at all to the doctrine of exchange. In the end, the economists ruled that their science does not at all teach what _ought_ to be, but simply what _is_, what _goes on_, and _will go on_, as an inevitable result of individuals holding exchangeable right in definite articles. Thus they seemed to have driven moral considerations out of their science, as much as out of gardening or medicine. To call their political economy, on that account, _heartless_ (as so many have done)