Thus, who thinks, and what is thought? What is a soul? what is a
body? I defy any one to escape this dualism. It is with
essences as with ideas: the former are seen separated in Nature,
as the latter in the understanding; and just as the ideas of God
and immortality, in spite of their identity, are posited
successively and contradictorily in philosophy, so, in spite of
their fusion in the absolute, the me and the not-me posit
themselves separately and contradictorily in Nature, and we have
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.
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