admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is bound to
happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by the mere fact that
we take them for general frames independent of the reality contained, for
detached language admitting empty and blank definition, always
representable by the same word, no matter what the circumstances: they are
no longer living and coloured ideas, but abstract, motionless, and neutral
forms, without shades or gradations, without distinction of case,
characterising two points of view from which you can observe anything and
everything. This being so, how could the application of these forms help
us to grasp the original and peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity
of the ego? Still further, how could we, between two such entities,
statically defined by their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis?
Correctly speaking, the interesting question is not whether there is unity,
multiplicity, combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of
unity, multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all,
to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and one
multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are connected,
how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at the roots. The
interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical colourless marks
indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the continuity between, with
its changing wealth of colouring, and the double progress of shades which
resolve it into red and violet.

But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we begin
from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts.

Again, the same duty of reversing our familiar attitude, of inverting our
customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. The conceptual
atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in a lower order than
rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. According to common thought,