Part 4 (1/2)

Things cease to be exclusively and solely h they may be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in another respect Plants, anianis space and as therefore having certain di separated into parts Trees are cut into logs, sawed into boards; anihtered and quartered But considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the essential property which distinguishes it froanism is not divisible If we do divide it, each component part ceases to be what it previously hen conjoined with the others Such a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so that the whole can never be reconstituted The various parts of an organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of theth of its relations to the others, for with them a true and essential unity If ever try to find out what this unity is by which all the li which can be observed and represented spatially, nothing endoith dimensions, however small, after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within itself and vivifies

If unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be spatially represented, or in other words, if it were so material, it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could not then be the unifying principle itself Hence the vanity of the efforts on the part of ists who obstinately strive to explain life by observing the parts which co the concurrence of their processes, their che, organically constituted, is so pure and sies the spirit

But the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual defy absolutely every attempt at division A poem may be considered in a certain way as ly be divided into various parts,--stanzas, lines, words But it is clear that such a separation cannot have the value which we assign to the divisions of things material For in their case every part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of its characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, stanza, verse, word, calls out and responds to every other part; and if isolated fro which it had in the context; or rather it loses every , and consequently perishes It is true that by conjectures we interpret even very sments of ancient poems But we do so only in so far as we clai approximent may live, by which it may be restored to life Likewise all the words lined up in dictionaries are as sodiscourses, to which they must somehow or other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand what they really were and what functions they had Multiplicity of parts in things of the spirit is only apparent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity, froin, its substance, and its life, so that weand a foundation

Nor is this the only unity possessed by the things that are assumed to be spiritual We have already considered the unity whereby, for example, the words of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in which each of them acquires a particular accent, a particular expression, and therefore a particular individuality We shall now consider another unity He who really perceives a poe, compact if you will, unseverable and united, but none the less independent of hu unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythrasp a sentiment in its development, a soul's throb in a moment of its life, a man, a personality The poetry of Dante is very different from that of Petrarch, because each is the expression of a powerfully distinct personality Any composition of these poets is understood and enjoyed only e feel in it the personal accent which distinguishes one poetical personality fronificance whatsoever, and therefore no existence as a poet

But the real artist leaves his imprint more or less iven instance, over and beyond the variety of the subjectsoul of the poet A poe And the sas that are cos material, it seems that there are immaterial ones which do not pertain as one's own to any particular person The ideas of which we had occasion to speak before,--immaterial entities, not perceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, and which severally correspond to all sorts or species of the various s by philosophers, and they are still so conceived to-day by the majority of men It is not requisite that one actually think them; it is sufficient that they be in themselves thinkable As a ht, no differently therefore from any of the material objects which are not created by our senses, but must already exist in order that our senses may perceive the to the material objects; and they are all different

They s in whose semblance and likeness they were devised There are horses in nature, and there is the idea of the horse by which we are able to recognise all the anis, and there is the dog which we rediscover in every one of them

And there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and lilies, as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and likewise iron, copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so on, to infinity It is impossible to set a li, distinguishi+ng, subdividing that nature which unfolds itself throughout space

This boundless h which our mind can rove, surely has no spatial extension But because of the necessity of conceiving any ht proper to posit an ideal space in addition to the physical one

In other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to dimensions properly so called But whether spatially or not, we strive to conceive ideas asby itself, and susceptible of being thought independently of the others In reality however we never succeed in thinking the a systeht except by thinking the others with it Take man as an instance: each one of us has intuitively the idea of man, but this idea is not possessed like a word of which wethe idea wewhich is its content If we knohat man is, we must be able to attribute a content to the idea ofani ani the ehter or by the inflection of his voice; because, in other words, he is the only anioes on within hi aniht the idea of _animal_ and the idea of _reason_ But can the idea of aniht by itself alone? It, as well as the idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must be connected with other ideas, without which it would be deprived of all consistency

And so the le idea is coed, to pass on to another, then to a third, and so on indefinitely It finds itself in the condition of the le link of a chain, just one, and found that he could not have it except on condition of taking the whole chain So it is with ideas We le thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it presents itself to us as a knot in which led They form an infinite chain, in which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one, because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and never reach the last Is not this the nature of the ideas as we see them, as they constitute the field frohts?

Ideas are not, therefore, a true s, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any space whatsoever Our ihts of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns us that they cannot be separated one from the other and placed side by side As I have already said: e think one, we think them all Or in any event we should, if we had ht ideas appear as constituting one unique whole, a unity, that soe They are not a multitude, for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be unthinkable Their connection with and participation in an absolute unity coht, and are therefore submitted to its activity, whereby they are ordered, correlated, organised, unified In order that we may say that one idea contains another, or many others, we must analyse this first idea and define it This first ideathemselves It is not therefore sufficient to say that there are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they necessarily would be if they existed _per se_, as objects of mere possible contemplation There must also be souish theht, we need thought also to mould and fashi+on this ht stuff, reduce it to sos would in no way be related a theenerated by thought as it thinks theenerates this relationshi+p not as a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things the for and developing No ideal, abiding science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore result from this relationshi+p It constitutes instead a science which is ever re-forives to the ideas an ever renewed aspect: iton each one of theht of the system into which it closely binds them

Ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a minutely fractioned and scattered multiplicity Nor are they a ht as it becoains distinctness by these many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of theradually formed, developed, and co renewed and which is never definitely perfected

There are not then ht Only in a s; and, properly speaking, they are the huht, which is busily occupied in the construction of knowledge They are an indivisible unity, in which each idea is found collaborating with every other one so as to answer the questions which Thought constantly propounds They are the human person, not the persons; for we have already concluded that only in an abstract sense is it possible to speak of many persons; concretely there is but one universal Person which is notback to our original division, persons and things, material and spiritual At the most there is one person, Man, and there are the s which constitute this nature, as it occupies space, and in which we too believe we have a place, in asbeyond this can be conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a ht perhaps stop considering the special interest that called forth this inquiry For no one could possibly suppose for a moment that culture could be placed in the s rather than in the spiritual reality which is a person However, since the intimate nature of this spiritual reality which we call culture is not yet clearly revealed, we ive ht ht be final

I s: the equipoise of spirit and matter

Do we really _think_ this matter as we say we do, and which we believe we are justified in opposing to the spirit, in as much as the spirit is unity or universality, and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its parts, in everything, is an indefinite ht only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity, that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality ofof multiplicity? In absolute terms we call multiple that which consists of elements each one of which is quite independent of all the others, and absolutely devoid of any and every relationshi+p with theate of ato no reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever In the world of pure quantity, which is the same as absolute e of units indifferent to their nexus, and therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being su place within the individual unit itself Numerical units are therefore pre-eminently irrelative

But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an absurd one In order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements Let us take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one will contain nothing of the other's, and will therefore exclude it fro of B would be found in A, and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative

Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each ter anything in common with it Without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns to the other and excludes it froation of it, there would be no irrelativity But this action by which each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a relationshi+p? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into parts co one another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very opposite of as intended, viz: the relative in place of the irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity

Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that unity which fuses and unifies everythemselves the units which constitute the number

We could stripit But then in the glooh would not be unity, but it would not even beat all Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely unthinkable

Thought then establishes relationshi+ps a the units of the multiple, and thus constitutes the multiplicity It adds and divides, composes and deco and de, so to speak, the reality which it thinks For it materialises the reality when it conceives it asit, and therefore by de it into its own spiritual substance

Matter is a manifold reality, without unity What it is we already have seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in the world in the eneric multitude Now, since pure multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract from that relationshi+p to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold eles are abstract entities Thought stops to consider theards them as existent, only because it withdraws the attention fro of the object represented Thought therefore prescinds fros could not by themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind absolutely unless ish to be reduced to an absurd conception

Objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable froht by which the personality is actualised Things are e in our own thought counterpose to ourselves who think the Their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us, for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity implies spiritual unity