89. We must have received the idea of a thinking being from internal experience: we may expand or restrict this idea, increasing or decreasing its perfection; but at bottom it remains always the same, and we cannot conceive thought in another being without attributing to it something similar to what we experience in ourselves. In this respect Kant is therefore right when he says that if we wish to represent to ourselves a thinking being we must put ourselves in the place of the object. According to him, we require for thought the absolute unity of the subject, only because without this unity it would be impossible to say, _I think_; since, although the totality of the thought may be distributed among the various subjects, the subjective _me_ cannot be divided or separated, and every thought supposes this _me_. The proposition, I think, is the foundation on which psychology raises the edifice of its knowledge: Kant admits this, but I cannot understand why, admitting that this proposition is the form of the apperception which is joined with and precedes all experience, he still says that it is not experimental; as though the thought were not just as subject to a real experience as its form; whereas if we closely examine it, we should rather say that the form is experienced than the thought itself, on the supposition that the latter is distinct whilst the form is identical in every instance; for the form in itself is only the consciousness of the unity identical in the midst of diversity. 90. In conceiving this absolute unity in the _me_, we do not, as Kant pretends, conceive a topical unity, but a real unity, if we suppose it to remain really the same through the variety of thought. When we enunciate this unity in the proposition, I think, we do not speak of a form in the abstract, common to all perceptions, but of something positive which is within us, and the reality of which is indispensable to the possibility of thought. 91. The German philosopher further says: "This subjective condition of all knowledge cannot with propriety be converted into a condition of the possibility of a knowledge of the objects; that is, into a conception of thinking being in general, since we cannot represent this being to ourselves without putting ourselves in its place by the formula of our consciousness." I do not believe that the psychologists who have pretended that they could demonstrate the simplicity of the soul, ever flattered themselves with arriving at a perfect idea of thinking beings, or denied that we obtain the type of this idea from our own experience; what they have pretended is, that reason leads them to infer that there is absolute unity of the subject wherever there is a thinking being; whether its thought may belong to a higher or lower order than our own.