Consider the simplest affirmation that can be made about the One, namely, "The One is." Here we have two things, "the One," and "is," that is to say, being. The proposition means that the One is Being. Hence the One is two. Firstly, it is itself, "One." Secondly, it is "Being," and the proposition affirms that these two things are one. Similarly with any other predicate we apply to the One. Whatever we say of it involves its duality. Thus we find that all systems of thought which {197} postulate an abstract unity as ultimate reality, such as Eleaticism, Hinduism, and the system of Spinoza, attempt to avoid the difficulty by saying nothing positive about the One. They apply to it only negative predicates, which tell us not what it is, but what it is not. Thus the Hindus speak of Brahman as form_less_, _im_mutable, _im_perishable, _un_moved, _un_created. But this, of course, is a futile expedient. In the first place, even a negative predicate involves the duality of the subject. And, in the second place, a negative predicate is always, by implication, a positive one. You cannot have a negative without a positive. To deny one thing is to affirm its opposite. To deny motion of the One, by calling it the unmoved, is to affirm rest of it. Thus a One which is not also a many is unthinkable. Similarly, the idea of the many is inconceivable without the idea of the One. For the many is many ones. Hence the One and the many cannot be separated in the Eleatic manner. Every unity must be a unity of the many. And every many is _ipso facto_ a unity, since we think the many in one idea, and, if we did not, we should not even know that it is a many. The Absolute must therefore be neither an abstract One, nor an abstract many. It must be a many in one. Similarly, Being cannot totally exclude not-being. They are, just as much as the One and the many, correlatives, which mutually involve each other. The being of anything is the not-being of its opposite. The being of light is the not-being of darkness. All being, therefore, has not-being in it.