De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

common source, ought to be and is called. But this whole unity of the subject with the object is not necessarily such, except at the time when the subject is thinking. Furthermore, every deduction of derived things, or special reasons, from one principle or absolute and inherently true reason does not occur except in the realm, if I may say so, of reason or formal truth. Finally, that necessary identification of diverse things, without which there would be neither affirmation nor negation, likewise pertains to the form of thinking. Whether, however, two objects—which are present in the mind and are held by the thinking subject at a given moment in a certain respect as one, that is, are conceived under the form of unity—are one by their very nature (which we are forced to attribute to those things that we cannot think of without the notion of existence), or whether they merely seem to the thinker to be one at that moment, that thinker indeed—no matter how much he himself becomes an object to the subject, that is, thinks from his own subjective unity with the object—cannot, while judging so formally, effect and decide. That this depends on the matter, everyone either proclaims or feels; but matter (I mean the internal matter of thinking) does not depend on that mode by which it is now thought by this one or that one, that is, reduced from diversity to unity. Rather, the ideal object—that is, that which resides in the mind and because of which the mind can rightly be called a subject-object—whenever it presents itself to the mind to be thought of along with existence, is subject to necessity or the reality of its own nature, so much so that to identify one ideal object with another formally is done in vain and erroneously, unless it is necessarily and