Examining the first of these ideas, we found that psychic phenomena were in themselves pure quality or qualitative multiplicity, and that, on the other hand, their cause situated in space was quantity. In so far as this quality becomes the sign of the quantity and we suspect the presence of the latter behind the former, we call it intensity. The intensity of a simple state, therefore, is not quantity but its qualitative sign. You will find that it arises from a compromise between pure quality, which is the state of consciousness, and pure quantity, which is necessarily space. Now you give up this compromise without the least scruple when you study external things, since you then leave aside the forces themselves, assuming that they exist, and consider only their measurable and extended effects. Why, then, do you keep to this hybrid concept when you analyse in its turn the state of consciousness? If magnitude, outside you, is never intensive, intensity, within you, is never magnitude. It is through having overlooked this that philosophers have been compelled to distinguish two kinds of quantity, the one extensive, the other intensive, without ever succeeding in explaining what they had in common or how the same words "increase" and "decrease" could be used for things so unlike. In the same way they are responsible for the exaggerations of psychophysics, for as soon as the power of increasing in magnitude is attributed to sensation in any other than a metaphorical sense, we are invited to find out by how much it increases. And, although consciousness does not measure intensive quantity, it does not follow that science may not succeed indirectly in doing so, if it be a magnitude. Hence, either a psychophysical formula is possible or the intensity of a simple psychic state is pure quality. [Sidenote: Our conscious states not a discreet multiplicity.] Turning then to the concept of multiplicity, we saw that to construct a number we must first have the intuition of a homogeneous medium, viz. space, in which terms distinct from one another could be set out in line, and, secondly, a process of permeation and organization by which these units are dynamically added together and form what we called a qualitative multiplicity. It is owing to this dynamic process that the units _get added,_ but it is because of their presence in space that they remain _distinct._ Hence number or discrete multiplicity also results from a compromise. Now, when we consider material objects in themselves, we give up this compromise, since we regard them as impenetrable and divisible, i.e. endlessly distinct from one another. Therefore, we must give it up, too, when we study our own selves. It is through having failed to do so that associationism has made many mistakes, such as trying to reconstruct a psychic state by the addition of distinct states of consciousness, thus substituting the symbol of the ego for the ego itself.