One, None and a Hundred-thousand

They were by no means an incompatible pair, although they were two strangers

you were two separate persons, each of them different from the other; and as a result, not being able to endure it any onger, you simply had to send one of them away at a certain point. Not your old friend, no; it was yourself that you sent away, the self that you are to your old friend, for the reason that you felt that self to be altogether different from the one that you are, or would like to be, to your new friend.

there by any chance a sole reality, one for all? Have we not already seen that there is not even one for each of us, since our own inner reality is constantly changing!

Have we not already seen that there is not even one for each of us, since our own inner reality is constantly changing!

Factual data, you say. And would you go on to deduce from it the reality that is mine?

But what about conditioning circumstances? I mean, those conditions affecting me that did not depend upon me. The determining conditions outside me, beyond any will of my own?

I began to do, by way of discovering all those other Moscardas that went on living in my nearest acquaintances, and with the object of destroying them one by one.

For that Gengè of hers existed, while I for her did not exist at all, never had existed

under a form in which they surely would not recognize themselves

but rather, as a being that was wholly strange to me, in that reality which, as I now beheld him