Part One

Origin of the Idea of Being

CHAPTER 1

Fact: we think being in all its universality

398. I begin with a simple, very obvious fact, the study of which forms the whole theory of this book: we think being in a universal mode.
This fact, no matter how we explain it, cannot be called into doubt.
To think being in a universal mode simply means thinking of the quality common to all things, while ignoring all other qualities, generic, specific or proper. I can will to fix my attention on one element of a thing rather than on another, and in concentrating exclusively on being, the quality common to all things, I am said to be thinking being in all its universality.

To deny that we can direct our attention to being as common to all things, while ignoring or rather abstracting from all their other qualities, contradicts what is attested by ordinary observation of our own actions; it would mean contradicting common sense and violating ordinary speech. When I say: reason is proper to humans, who have feeling in common with animals, and vegetable life in common with plants, but being in common with everything, I am considering this common being independently of everything else. If humans did not have the ability to think being separately from everything else, this statement would be impossible.
This fact is so obvious that to mention it would be sufficient, if it were not for the doubt prevalent in modern thinking. Yet it is the extremely simple foundation of the entire theory of the origin of ideas.

399. To think being in a universal mode means that we have the idea of being in all its universality, or at least presupposes that we have it; without the idea of being, we cannot think being.
Our task, then, is to identify the origin of this idea. But if we are to discover its source, we must first examine its nature and character.