_La Raison_, says Leibniz, _est l'enchainement des vérités._[8] Truth linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the prerogative of the mere _demos_, nor of the intellectual aristocracy, but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth, thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth every man. Truth--to use again the language of Leibniz,--which is not merely the aggregate of monads,--but the monad of monads, their mutual penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of Reason--not outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual and abstract intelligence,--but intelligence, charged with emotion, full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea, resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things, if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis, and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'--a concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction. [Footnote 1: 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence (1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' &c.] [Footnote 2: Louis Blanc, _History of the Revolution_, vol. i.]