stinctive; we are haunted by
all kinds of ideas and principles, so familiar today that they even pass
unobserved. But what is it all worth?

Does it, in its present state, help us to know the nature of a
disinterested intuition?

Nothing but a methodical examination of consciousness can tell us that;
and it will take more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge to
recreate in us a new mind, capable of grasping the bare fact exactly
as it is: what we require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind of
conversion.

The rational and perceptive function we term our intelligence emerges
from darkness through a slowly lifting dawn. During this twilight period
it has lived, worked, acted, fashioned and informed itself. On the
threshold of philosophical speculation it is full of more or less
concealed beliefs, which are literally prejudices, and branded with a
secret mark influencing its every movement. Here is an actual situation.
Exemption from it is beyond anyone's province. Whether we will or no,
we are from the beginning of our inquiry immersed in a doctrine which
disguises nature to us, and already at bottom constitutes a complete
metaphysic. This we term common-sense, and positive science is itself
only an extension and refinement of it. What is the value of this work
performed without clear consciousness or critical attention? Does
it bring us into true relation with things, into relation with pure
consciousness?

This is our first and inevitable doubt, which requires solution.

But it would be a quixotic proceeding first to make a void in our mind,
and afterwards to admit into it, one by one, after investigation, such
and such a concept, or such and such a principle. The illusion of
the clean sweep and total reconstruction can never be too vigorously
condemned.

Is it from the void that we set out to think? Do we think in void, and
with nothing? Common ideas of necessity form the groundwork for the
broidery of our advanced thought. Further, even if we succeeded in our
impossible task, should we, in so doing, have corrected the causes
of error which are today graven upon the very structure of our
intelligence, such as our past life has made it? These errors would not
cease to act imperceptibly upon the work of revision intended to apply
the remedy.

It is from within, by an effort of immanent purgation, that the
necessary reform must be brought about. And philosophy's first task is
to institute critical refle