CHAP. II. j FIEST TEUTHS. 33 



&quot; Feelings &quot; are but the materials of certainty, and though 

 we can be perfectly certain about our feelings, that certainty 

 belongs to thought, and to thought only. Thought, therefore, 

 is our ultimate and absolute criterion, that to which we can 

 alone appeal. It is by self-conscious thought only that we 

 know we have any feelings at all. Without thought, indeed, 

 we might feel, but we could not know that we felt, or know 

 ourselves as feeling. 



We have then self-consciousness and thought, called into 

 action through sensation, from which to build up, as we may, 

 our fabric of knowledge, and these faculties, as we shall shortly 

 see, imply much more, and in fact suffice by themselves to 

 carry us out from our internal world of thought into an 

 external universe of real existence. Indeed, our subjective 

 knowledge of our own past existence, which is to us now an 

 objective fact, suffices to enable us at once to cross the bridge 

 (provided for us by nature) spanning the bottomless abyss 

 separating subjectivity from objectivity ; separating, that is, 

 the world of existence outside our consciousness from the 

 world of our conscious existence. 



But it is time to return to the question of first truths, and 

 to the question respecting the ultimate foundation of philo 

 sophy and the true basis of certitude, and the necessity of 

 our intellect finding and possessing undemonstrated and 

 uudenionstrable certainties by which all other truths may be 

 proved, if truth is to exist for us at all. 



Balmes * has well said : &quot; Not only are not all things 

 demonstrated, but it may even be demonstrated that some 

 things are undemonstrable. Demonstration is a ratiocination, 

 in which we infer from evident propositions a pro- Balmesand 

 position evidently connected with them. If the spence^to 

 premisses are of themselves evident, they do not of e s ^ ity 

 admit of demonstration; if we suppose them in monstrable 

 their turn demonstrable, we shall have the same 

 difficulty with respect to those on which the new demon- 



Fundamental Philosophy (translated by Brownson), vol. i. p. 106. 



D 



