Plotinus erred by pushing to excess the Platonic dialectics, and by extending them beyond the boundary where they should stop. In Plato they terminate at ideas, at the idea of the good, and produce an intelligent and good God; Plotinus applies them without limit, and they lead him into an abyss of mysticism. If all truth is in the general, and if all individuality is imperfection, it follows, that as long as we are able to generalize, as long as it is possible for us to overlook any difference, to exclude any determination, we shall not be at the limit of dialectics. Its last object, then, will be a principle without any determination. It will not spare in God being itself. In fact, if we say that God is a being, by the side of and above being, we place unity, of which being partakes, and which it cannot disengage, in order to consider it alone. Being is not here simple, since it is at once being and unity; unity alone is simple, for one cannot go beyond that. And still when we say unity, we determine it. True absolute unity must, then, be something absolutely indeterminate, which is not, which, properly speaking, cannot be named, the _unnamable_, as Plotinus says. This principle, which exists not, for a still stronger reason, cannot think, for all thought is still a determination, a manner of being. So being and thought are excluded from absolute unity. If Alexandrianism admits them, it is only as a forfeiture, a degradation of unity. Considered in thought, and in being, the supreme principle is inferior to itself; only in the pure simplicity of its indefinable essence is it the last object of science, and the last term of perfection. In order to enter into communication with such a God, the ordinary faculties are not sufficient, and the theodicea of the school of Alexandria imposes upon it a quite peculiar psychology. In the truth of things, reason conceives absolute unity as an attribute of absolute being, but not as something in itself, or, if it considers it apart, it knows that it considers only an abstraction. Does one wish to make absolute unity something else than an attribute of an absolute being, or an abstraction, a conception of human intelligence? Reason could accept nothing more on any condition. Will this barren unity be the object of love? But love, much more than reason, aspires after a real object. One does not love substance in general, but a substance that possesses such or such a character. In human friendships, suppress all the qualities of a person, or modify them, and you modify or suppress the love. This does not prove that you do not love this person; it only proves that the person is not for you without his qualities.