But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an absurd one. In order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements. Let us take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one will contain nothing of the other's, and will therefore exclude it from itself. If A did not so exclude B, something of B would be found in A, and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative. Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each term is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in common with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a negation of it, there would be no irrelativity. But this action by which each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity. Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number, which correlates among themselves the units which constitute the number. We could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it could not be anything at all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely unthinkable. Thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple, and thus constitutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming multiplicity. It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak, the reality which it thinks. For it materialises the reality when it conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into its own spiritual substance.