Ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because they are not things, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any space whatsoever. Our imagination may present them to us as so many lights 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: when we think one, we think them all. Or in any event we should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. So that to our thought ideas appear as constituting one unique whole, a unity, that something which we call 102 science, truth, knowledge. 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 come from the fact that they are the object of thought, 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 idea must be distinguished from the others, and they likewise among themselves. 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 some one to analyse them, define them, and distinguish them. It is not enough to have the material of thought, we need thought also to mould and fashion this material, turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to something susceptible of being thought. Ideas as things would in no way be related among themselves. But they do have that relationship which is generated by thought as it thinks them. Thought generates this relationship not as a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things themselves; but as a relationship which is being formed by degrees, and which is continuously changing and developing. No ideal, abiding science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore 103 result from this relationship. It constitutes instead a science which is ever re-formed and is never formed; it gives to the ideas an ever renewed aspect: it matures them, elaborates them, perfects them, by concentrating on each one of them the constantly increasing light 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 mass of concurrent elements. They are Thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness by these many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of them, in the process by which they are gradually formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed in an order which is constantly being renewed and which is never definitely perfected.
There are not then many ideas; there is one Idea, which is Thought. Only in a metaphorical sense can we consider them as things; and, properly speaking, they are the human person itself as actualised in thought, 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 not multiplicable.
There are not, then, going back to our original division, persons and things, material and spiritual. At the most there is one person, Man, and there are the material things which constitute this nature, as it occupies space, and in which we too believe we have a place, in as much as we consider ourselves beings of nature. Nothing beyond this can be conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a manifold reality, indefinitely divisible.
Here we might 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 midst of material things 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 must continue our investigations, and give more attention to this division which for a moment we thought might be final. I mean the division of the world into persons and things: 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 multiplicity? Matter can in truth be thought only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity, that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality of matter.
What then is the meaning of 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 relationship with them. The materialist conceived the world as an aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other and having no reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever. In the world of pure quantity, which is the same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical science claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their nexus, and therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being summed up and divided, without any alteration taking 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 from itself. If A did not so exclude B, something 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 term is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in common with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each 106 term turns to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a negation 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 relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity.