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,--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.