One ought to feel now the mistake of Kant in all its extent. This philosopher having confounded one of the principal modifications of man, his intelligence,[516] whose seat is in the soul, with one of his secondary faculties, his reason, finds himself, in raising this reason outside of its place and giving it a dominance that it has not, ousting entirely the spiritual part; so that meditating constantly in the median part of his being, which he believed to be the superior, and descending, he found matter, understood it perfectly, and missed absolutely the spirit. What he assumed was, it was nothing else than the understanding, a neuter faculty placed between sense perception which is purely passive, and the intelligence which is wholly active. He had the weakness to fix his thought here and thenceforth was lost. Reason which he invoked to teach him to distinguish, in his ideas, the part which is furnished by the spirit, from that which is given by objects, was only able to show him the straight line that it described in his understanding. This line being buried in matter instead of rising in intelligible regions, taught him that everything that did not correspond to a possible experience could not furnish him the subject of a positive knowledge, and thus all the great questions upon the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the origin of the Universe; all that pertains to theosophy, to cosmology; in short, all that which is intelligible, cannot take place in the order of his understanding.[517] This catastrophe, quite inevitable as it was, was none the less poignant. It was odd to see a man who seemed to promise to establish the possibility and the principles of all knowledge upon an incontestable basis, announce coldly that God, the Universe, and the Soul could not be subjects there, and soon discover, pushed by the force of his reasoning, that even the reality of physical subjects by which the senses are affected is only phenomenal, that one can in no way know what they are, but only what they appear to be[518]; and that even one’s own Self, considered as a subject, is also for one only a phenomenon, an appearance, concerning the intimate essence of which one can learn nothing.[519] Kant felt indeed the terrible contradiction into which he had fallen; but instead of retracing courageously his steps, and seeking above reason for the principles of knowledge that it did not possess, he continued his descending movement which he called transcendental, and finally discovered beneath this _pure Reason_, a certain _practical Reason_, to which he confided the destinies of the greatest subjects with which man can be occupied: God, nature, and himself. This practical reason, which is no other than _common sense_, ought, according to him, to bring man to believe what is not given him to know,[520] and to engage him, through the need of his own felicity, to follow the paths of virtue, and to