beings who think, at the same time with others which do not
think.

Now, whoever has taken pains to reflect knows today that such a
distinction, wholly realized though it be, is the most
unintelligible, most contradictory, most absurd thing which
reason can possibly meet. Being is no more conceivable without
the properties of spirit than without the properties of
matter: so that if you deny spirit, because, included in none of
the categories of time, space, motion, solidity, etc., it seems
deprived of all the attributes which constitute reality, I in my
turn will deny matter, which, presenting nothing appreciable but
its inertia, nothing intelligible but its forms, manifests itself
nowhere as cause (voluntary and free), and disappears from view
entirely as substance; and we arrive at pure idealism, that is,
nihility. But nihility is inconsistent with the existence of
living, reasoning--I know not what to call them--uniting in
themselves, in a state of commenced synthesis or imminent
dissolution, all the antagonistic attributes of being. We are
compelled, then, to end in a dualism whose terms we know
perfectly well to be false, but which, being for us the condition
of the truth, forces itself irresistibly upon us; we are
compelled, in short, to commence, like Descartes and the human
race, with the me; that is, with spirit.

But, since religions and philosophies, dissolved by analysis,
have disappeared in the theory of the absolute, we know no better
than before what spirit is, and in this differ from the ancients
only in the wealth of language with which we adorn the darkness
that envelops us. With this exception, however; that while, to