object existing. Such an act consists simply in declaring
that the existence attached by our mind to the object, and inseparable
from its representation, is an existence wholly ideal--that of a mere
_possible_. But the "ideality" of an object, and the "simple
possibility" of an object, have meaning only in relation to a reality
that drives into the region of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the
object which is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and more
substantial existence annihilated: it is the attenuated and weaker
existence of the merely possible that becomes the reality itself, and
you will no longer be representing the object, then, as non-existent. In
other words, and however strange our assertion may seem, _there is_
more, _and not_ less, _in the idea of an object conceived as "not
existing" than in the idea of this same object conceived as "existing";
for the idea of the object "not existing" is necessarily the idea of the
object "existing" with, in addition, the representation of an exclusion
of this object by the actual reality taken in block_.

But it will be claimed that our idea of the non-existent is not yet
sufficiently cut loose from every imaginative element, that it is not
negative enough. "No matter," we shall be told, "though the unreality of
a thing consist in its exclusion by other things; we want to know
nothing about that. Are we not free to direct our attention where we
please and how we please? Well then, after having called up the idea of
an object, and thereby, if you will have it so, supposed it existent, we
shall merely couple to our affirmation a 'not,' and that will be enough
to make us think it non-existent. This is an operation entirely
intellectual, independent of what happens outside the mind. So let us
think of anything or let us think of the totality of things, and then
write in the margin of our thought the 'not,' which prescribes the
rejection of what it contains: we annihilate everything mentally by the
mere fact of decreeing its annihilation."--Here we have it! The very
root of all the difficulties and errors with which we are confronted is
to be found in the power ascribed here to negation. We represent
negation as exactly symmetrical with affirmation. We imagine that
negation, like affirmation, is self-sufficient. So that negation, like
affirmation, would have the power of creating ideas, with this sole
difference that they would be negative ideas. By affirming o