124. The multiplicity of substances is no less attested by the consciousness of ourselves, or of the internal world. Our first reflex act reveals within us something which is one, indivisible, and remaining always the same through all the transformations of our being. This unity of the _me_ is indispensable to the connection of all the phenomena in a point; without it all memory, all combination, and all consciousness are impossible; our own being disappears, and there remains only a series of unconnected phenomena. But this unity, which we must take as an internal fact which consciousness places beyond all doubt, and the conviction of which it is impossible for us to withstand,--this unity produces the knowledge of multiplicity. There is something which affects us and which is not ourselves. Our will, our activity, is impotent to resist other activities which act upon us; there is, then, something which is not ourselves, which is independent of us. There is something which is not a modification of ourselves, because very often it does not affect us, does not modify us. This something is a reality, for nothing cannot affect any thing. It is not inherent in us; it is, then, in itself, or in something which is not ourselves. There is, therefore, a substance which is not our substance; and the _me_ and the _not-me_ which have made so much noise in German philosophy, far from leading to the unity of the substance, lead to multiplicity; and destroy pantheism entrenched behind idealism. 125. At the very first we meet at least with duality, the _me_ and the _not-me_; but carrying our observations a little farther, we find a striking multiplicity. Our mind is not alone: the consciousness of what we daily experience proves our communication with other minds, which, like our own, have the consciousness of themselves--a sphere of activity of their own, and, like our own mind, are subjected to other activities without their will, and sometimes even against it. The _me_ and the _not-me_ existing for our consciousness, exists also for theirs; what in us alone was duality becomes a wonderful multiplicity by means of the repetition of the same fact which we have experienced in ourselves. 126. To attribute this variety of consciousnesses to the same being, to take them as modifications of the same substance, as revelations of itself to its own eyes, is a gratuitous assertion; and not only gratuitous but absurd. With full confidence I can defy the greatest philosopher of the world to assign any reason, I do not say satisfactory, but even a specious reason, proving that two individual consciousnesses belong to a common consciousness, or are consciousnesses of the same being.