By the fact that it is a system which by its generality seems to satisfy a supreme tendency of our mind, and to appease one of the most imperative cravings of our souls. Man's intelligence has a natural tendency to synthesize, that is, to bring everything into unity. This tendency arises both from the essential oneness of the mind and from the nature of its object. The object of the mind is being or reality in some form or other. That which does exist cannot even be apprehended, and hence cannot be the object of the mind. To understand and to understand nothing is, at the same time, the affirmation and the negation of the understanding. {183} Now, if the object of the intelligence, in order to be known and understood by the said faculty, must represent itself under the form of being or reality, it is under this respect necessarily one. Under whatever form it may exhibit itself, under whatever quality it may be concealed, it must always be reality or being, and, as such, one. But if being, reality, or unity, taken in the abstract, was the sole object of the intelligence, there would be an end to all its movement or life. All science would be at an end, because science is a process, a movement; and movement is not possible where an abstraction is the sole object of the mind. Being and unity, then, abstractly considered, would be the eternal stupor of the mind. This cannot be so, however. Intelligence is action, life, movement. Now, all this implies multiplicity; hence the object of the intelligence must also be multiple. But does not this second condition also destroy the former, which requires that the object of the intelligence should be one? Here reason finds a necessary, though, as we shall see, only an apparent contradiction, both in the logical as well as ontological order. In the logical order, because the intelligence seems to require unity and multiplicity as the conditions without which its action becomes impossible. In the ontological order, or the order of reality, because if the object is not at the same time one and multiple, how can those conditions of the mind be satisfied? The intelligence, then, in order to live, must be able to travel from unity to multiplicity in an ascending or descending process, and to do so, not arbitrarily, but for reasons resting on reality. In this lies the life of the intelligence; science is nothing but this synthetical and analytical movement. Let the mind stop at analysis or multiplicity, and you will give it an agglomeration of facts of which it can neither see the reason nor the link which connects them: and hence you place it in unnatural bonds, which, sooner or later, it will break, it matters not whether by a sophistical or a dialectic process. On the other hand, let it stop at unity, and you condemn it to stupor and death.