abstract unity, it is the precise unity of perfect being in which every thing is accomplished. At the summit of existence, still more than at its low degree, every thing is determinate, every thing is developed, every thing is distinct, every thing is one. The richness of determinations is a certain sign of the plenitude of being. Reflection distinguishes these determinations from each other, but it is not necessary that it should in these distinctions see the limits. In us, for example, does the diversity of our faculties and their richest development divide the _me_ and alter the identity and the unity of the person? Does each one of us believe himself less than himself, because he possesses sensibility, reason, and will? No, surely. It is the same with God. Not having employed a sufficient psychology, Alexandrian mysticism imagined that diversity of attributes is incompatible with simplicity of essence, and through fear of corrupting simple and pure essence, it made of it an abstraction. By a senseless scruple, it feared that God would not be sufficiently perfect, if it left him all his perfections; it regards them as imperfections, being as a degradation, creation as a fall; and, in order to explain man and the universe, it is forced to put in God what it calls failings, not having seen that these pretended failings are the very signs of his infinite perfection. The theory of ecstasy is at once the necessary condition and the condemnation of the theory of absolute unity. Without absolute unity as the direct object of knowledge, of what use is ecstasy in the subject of knowledge? Ecstasy, far from elevating man to God, abases him below man; for it effaces in him thought, by taking away its condition, which is consciousness. To suppress consciousness, is to render all knowledge impossible; it is not to comprehend the perfection of this mode of knowing, wherein the limitation of subject and object gives at once the simplest, most immediate, and most determinate knowledge.[90]