individualizes, concretes, numbers, compares, things which,
material or immaterial, are thoroughly identical and
indistinguishable. Matter, as well as spirit, plays, as we view
it, all sorts of parts; and, as there is nothing arbitrary in its
metamorphoses, we build upon them these psychologic and atomic
theories, true in so far as they faithfully represent, in terms
agreed upon, the series of phenomena, but radically false as soon
as they pretend to realize their abstractions and are accepted
literally.



2. But what, then, is the source of this supposition that matter
is impenetrable, which external observation does not justify and
which is not true; and what is its meaning?

Here appears the triumph of dualism. Matter is pronounced
impenetrable, not, as the materialists and the vulgar fancy, by
the testimony of the senses, but by the conscience. The ME, an
incomprehensible nature, feeling itself free, distinct, and
permanent, and meeting outside of itself another nature equally
incomprehensible, but also distinct and permanent in spite of its
metamorphoses, declares, on the strength of the sensations and
ideas which this essence suggests to it, that the NOT-ME is
extended and impenetrable. Impenetrability is a figurative term,
an image by which thought, a division of the absolute, pictures
to itself material reality, another division of the absolute; but
this impenetrability, without which matter disappears, is, in the
last analysis, only a spontaneous judgment of inward sensation, a
metaphysical a priori, an unverified hypothesis of spirit.