order, and not disorder, in things. But the question has meaning only
if we suppose that disorder, understood as an absence of order, is
possible, or imaginable, or conceivable. Now, it is only order that is
real; but, as order can take two forms, and as the presence of the one
may be said to consist in the absence of the other, we speak of disorder
whenever we have before us that one of the two orders for which we are
not looking. The idea of disorder is then entirely practical. It
corresponds to the disappointment of a certain expectation, and it does
not denote the absence of all order, but only the presence of that order
which does not offer us actual interest. So that whenever we try to deny
order completely, absolutely, we find that we are leaping from one kind
of order to the other indefinitely, and that the supposed suppression of
the one and the other implies the presence of the two. Indeed, if we go
on, and persist in shutting our eyes to this movement of the mind and
all it involves, we are no longer dealing with an idea; all that is left
of disorder is a word. Thus the problem of knowledge is complicated, and
possibly made insoluble, by the idea that order fills a void and that
its actual presence is superposed on its virtual absence. We go from
absence to presence, from the void to the full, in virtue of the
fundamental illusion of our understanding. That is the error of which we
noticed one consequence in our last chapter. As we then anticipated, we
must come to close quarters with this error, and finally grapple with
it. We must face it in itself, in the radically false conception which
it implies of negation, of the void and of the nought.[97]

Philosophers have paid little attention to the idea of the nought. And
yet it is often the hidden spring, the invisible mover of philosophical
thinking. From the first awakening of reflection, it is this that pushes
to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the torturing
problems, the questions that we cannot gaze at without feeling giddy and
bewildered. I have no sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself
why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate connection in which
I stand to the rest of the universe, the difficulty is only pushed back,
for I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe
to a Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it,
my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, fo