Four hands can do more than two, but also four eyes can see more than two. And this combined power is distinguished not only in quantity but also in quality from that which is solitary. In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite. Only where man suns and warms himself in the proximity of man arise feeling and imagination. To ask a question and to answer are the first acts of thought.
Thought originally demands two.
It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself. The common people, i.e., people in whom the power of abstraction has not been developed, are still incapable of understanding what is written if they do not read it audibly, if they do not pronounce what they read. The distinction between the heathen eternity of matter and the Christian creation in this respect is only that the heathens ascribed to the world a real, objective eternity, whereas the Christians gave it an invisible, immaterial eternity. The Christians, whose principle is that of absolute subjectivity, conceive all things as effected only through this principle. Nevertheless, this distinction is only a distinction in the mode of existence.