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,--that compels
us to infer a CAUSE of its occurrence; every thing which exists implies
the ideas of SUBSTANCE, MODE, RELATION, NUMBER, &C.; in a word, we form
no idea which is not related to some one of the general principles of
reason, independent of which nothing exists.

These axioms of the understanding, add the psychologists, these
fundamental types, by which all our judgments and ideas are inevitably
shaped, and which our sensations serve only to illuminate, are known
in the schools as CATEGORIES. Their primordial existence in the mind is
to-day demonstrated; they need only to be systematized and catalogued.
Aristotle recognized ten; Kant increased the number to fifteen; M.
Cousin has reduced it to three, to two, to one; and the indisputable
glory of this professor will be due to the fact that, if he has not
discovered the true theory of categories, he has, at least, seen more
clearly than any one else the vast importance of this question,--the
greatest and perhaps the only one with which metaphysics has to deal.

I confess that I disbelieve in the innateness, not only of IDEAS, but
also of FORMS or LAWS of our understanding; and I hold the metaphysics
of Reid and Kant to be still farther removed from the truth than that of
Aristotle. However, as I do not wish to enter here into a discussion of
the mind, a task which would demand much labor and be of no interest to
the public, I shall admit the hypothesis that our most general and
most necessary ideas--such as time, space, substance, and cause--exist
originally in the mind; or, at least, are derived immediately from its
constitution.

But it is a psychological fact none the less true, and one to which the
philosophers have paid too little attention, that habit, like a second
nature, has the power of fixing in the mind new categorical forms
derived from the appearances which impress us, and by them usually
stripped of objective reality, but whose in