One can easily see that the faculty which Kant designates by the word _Empfindlichkeit_, sense perception, belongs to the physical part of man; and that which he expresses by the word _Verstand_, the understanding, resides in his animistic part; but one cannot see at all that what he names _Vernunft_, and which he continually confounds with reason, may be able in any manner to dominate in his intellectual part. For this, it would be necessary that he should consider it under the relation of the intelligence; which he has not done. It is very true that he has wished to place it constantly in the mind, by representing the three faculties of which man is composed as a sort of hierarchy, of which sense perception occupies the base, understanding the centre, and reason the summit; or as one of his translators said, imagining this hierarchy under the emblem of an empire, of which sense perception constitutes the subjects, understanding the agents or ministers, and reason the sovereign or legislator.[512] I cannot conceive how Kant, by giving the word _Vernunft_, the meaning of the Latin word _ratio_, has been able to say that it is the highest degree of the activity of a mind which has the power of all its liberty, and the consciousness of all its strength[513]: there is nothing more false. Reason does not exist in liberty, but on the contrary, in necessity. Its movement, which is geometric, is always forced: it is an inference from the point of departure, and nothing more. Let us examine this carefully. The Latin word _ratio_, whose meaning Kant has visibly followed, has never translated exactly the Greek word _logos_, in the sense of _word_; and if the Greek philosophers have substituted sometimes the _logos_ for _nous_, or the word for the intelligence, by taking the effect for the cause, it is wrong when the Romans have tried to imitate them, by using _ratio_, in place of _mens_, or _intelligentia_. In this they have proved their ignorance and have disclosed the calamitous ravages that skepticism had already made among them. The word _ratio_ springs from the root _ra_ or _rat_, which in all the tongues where it has been received, has carried the idea of a _ray_, a straight line drawn from one point to another.[514] Thus reason, far from being free as Kant has pretended, is what is the most constrained in nature: it is a geometric line, always subject to the point whence it emanates, and forced to strike the point toward which it is directed under penalty of ceasing to be itself; that is to say, of ceasing to be straight. Now, reason not being free in its course, is neither good nor bad in itself; it is always analogous to the principle of which it is the inference. Its nature is to go straight; its perfection is nothing else. One goes straight in every way, in every direction, high, low, to right, to left; one reasons correctly in truth as in error, in vice as in virtue: all depends upon