Babylonians, magic from the Thracians, and much also from the Assyrians, so he had learnt his theism from the Jews: Οιδα σου τους διδασκαλους, καν αποκρυπτειν εθελῇς, ... δοξαν την του θεου παρ᾽ αυτων ωφελησει των Εβραιων (_Tuos magistros novi, licet eos celare velis, ... illa de Deo sententia suppeditata tibi est ab Hebræis_). A pathetic scene of recognition. But I see a remarkable confirmation of the matter in what follows. According to Plutarch (_in Mario_), and, better, according to Lactantius (i. 3, 19), Plato thanked Nature that he had been born a human being and not a brute, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian. Now in Isaac Euchel’s “Prayers of the Jews,” from the Hebrew, second edition, 1799, p. 7, there is a morning prayer in which God is thanked and praised that the worshipper was born a Jew and not a heathen, a free man and not a slave, a man and not a woman. Such an historical investigation would have spared Kant an unfortunate necessity in which he now becomes involved, in that he makes these three conceptions spring necessarily from the nature of reason, and yet explains that they are untenable and unverifiable by the reason, and thus makes the reason itself a sophisticator; for he says, p. 339; V. 397: “There are sophistications, not of man, but of pure reason itself, from which even the wisest cannot free himself, and although after much trouble he may be able to avoid error, yet he never can escape from the illusion which unceasingly torments and mocks him.” Therefore these Kantian “Ideas of the Reason” might be compared to the focus in which the converging reflected rays from a concave mirror meet several inches before its surface, in consequence of which, by an inevitable process of the understanding, an object presents itself to us there which is a thing without reality.