Here, accordingly, comes into view the further and in some respects deeper conceptual pair, Many and One. The history of philosophic thought proves that this antithesis is darkly obscure and deeply ambiguous; for about it have centred a large part of the conflicts of doctrine. This pair has already been used, implicitly, in exhibiting the development of the preceding group, Cause and Effect; and in so using it we have supplied ourselves with a partial clarification of it, and with one possible solution of its ambiguity. We have seen, namely, how our strong natural persuasion that philosophy guided by the fundamental concept Cause must become the search for the One amid the wilderness of the Many, and that this search cannot be satisfied and ended except in an all-inclusive Unit, in which the Many is embraced as the integral and originated parts, completely determined, subjected, and controlled, may give way to another and less oppressive conception of unity; a conception of it as the harmony among many free and independent primary realities, a harmony founded on their intelligent and reasonable mutual recognition. This conception casts at least _some_ clearing light upon the long and dreary disputes over the Many and the One; for it exposes, plainly, the main source of them. They have arisen out of two chief ambiguities,--the ambiguity of the concept One, and the ambiguity of the concept Cause in its supreme meaning. The normal contrast between the One and the Many is a clear and simple contrast: the One is the single unit, and the Many is the repetition of the unit, or is the collection of the several units. But if we go on to suppose that there is a collection or sum of all possible units, and call this the Whole, then, since there can be no second such, we call it also "one" (or the One, by way of preëminence), overlooking the fact that it differs from the simple one, or unit, _in genere_; that it is in fact not a unit at all, not an elementary member of a series, but the annulment of all series; that our name "one" has profoundly changed its meaning, and now stands for the Sole, the Only. Thus, by our forgetfulness of differences, we fall into deep water, and, with the confused illusions of the drowning, dream of the One and All as the single _punctum originationis_ of all things, the Source and Begetter of the very units of which it is in reality only the resultant and the derivative. Or, from another point of view, and in another mood, we rightly enough take the One to mean the coherent, the intelligible, the consistent, the harmonious; and putting the Many, on the misleading hint of its contrast to the unit, in antithesis to this One of harmony, we fall into the belief that the Many cannot be harmonious, is intrinsically a cluster of repulsions or of collisions, incapable of giving rise to accord; indeed, essentially hostile to it. So, as accord is the aim and the essence of our reason,