these authors, only shows their ignorance of the peculiar nature of
logical science. We do not enlarge but disfigure the sciences when
we lose sight of their respective limits and allow them to run into
one another. Now logic is enclosed within limits which admit of
perfectly clear definition; it is a science which has for its object
nothing but the exposition and proof of the formal laws of all
thought, whether it be a priori or empirical, whatever be its origin
or its object, and whatever the difficulties--natural or accidental--
which it encounters in the human mind.

The early success of logic must be attributed exclusively to the
narrowness of its field, in which abstraction may, or rather must,
be made of all the objects of cognition with their characteristic
distinctions, and in which the understanding has only to deal with
itself and with its own forms. It is, obviously, a much more difficult
task for reason to strike into the sure path of science, where it
has to deal not simply with itself, but with objects external to
itself. Hence, logic is properly only a propaedeutic--forms, as it
were, the vestibule of the sciences; and while it is necessary to
enable us to form a correct judgement with regard to the various
branches of knowledge, still the acquisition of real, substantive
knowledge is to be sought only in the sciences properly so called,
that is, in the objective sciences.

Now these sciences, if they can be termed rational at all, must
contain elements of a priori cognition, and this cognition may stand
in a twofold relation to its object. Either it may have to determine
the conception of the object--which must be supplied extraneously,
or it may have to establish its reality. The former is theoretical,
the latter practical, rational cognition. In both, the pure or a