an idea which permeates all minds, which to-morrow will be
proclaimed by another if I fail to announce it to-day,--I can
claim no merit save that of priority of utterance. Do we
eulogize the man who first perceives the dawn?

Yes: all men believe and repeat that equality of conditions is
identical with equality of rights; that PROPERTY and ROBBERY
are synonymous terms; that every social advantage accorded, or
rather usurped, in the name of superior talent or service, is
iniquity and extortion. All men in their hearts, I say, bear
witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand
it.

Before entering directly upon the question before me, I must
say a word of the road that I shall traverse. When Pascal
approached a geometrical problem, he invented a method of
solution; to solve a problem in philosophy a method is equally
necessary. Well, by how much do the problems of which philosophy
treats surpass in the gravity of their results those discussed by
geometry! How much more imperatively, then, do they demand for
their solution a profound and rigorous analysis!

It is a fact placed for ever beyond doubt, say the modern
psychologists, that every perception received by the mind is
determined by certain general laws which govern the mind; is
moulded, so to speak, in certain types pre-existing in our
understanding, and which constitutes its original condition.
Hence, say they, if the mind has no innate IDEAS, it has at
least innate FORMS. Thus, for example, every phenomenon is of
necessity conceived by us as happening in TIME and SPACE,--