e tell him he ought to affirm something else (though without specifying
the affirmation which must be substituted). There is no longer then,
simply, a person and an object; there is, in face of the object, a
person speaking to a person, opposing him and aiding him at the same
time; there is a beginning of society. Negation aims at some one, and
not only, like a purely intellectual operation, at some thing. It is of
a pedagogical and social nature. It sets straight or rather warns, the
person warned and set straight being possibly, by a kind of doubling,
the very person that speaks.

So much for the second point; now for the first. We said that negation
is but the half of an intellectual act, of which the other half is left
indeterminate. If I pronounce the negative proposition, "This table is
not white," I mean that you ought to substitute for your judgment, "The
table is white," another judgment. I give you an admonition, and the
admonition refers to the necessity of a substitution. As to what you
ought to substitute for your affirmation, I tell you nothing, it is
true. This may be because I do not know the color of the table; but it
is also, it is indeed even more, because the white color is that alone
that interests us for the moment, so that I only need to tell you that
some other color will have to be substituted for white, without having
to say which. A negative judgment is therefore really one which
indicates a need of substituting for an affirmative judgment another
affirmative judgment, the nature of which, however, is not specified,
sometimes because it is not known, more often because it fails to offer
any actual interest, the attention bearing only on the substance of the
first.

Thus, whenever I add a "not" to an affirmation, whenever I deny, I
perform two very definite acts: (1) I interest myself in what one of my
fellow-men affirms, or in what he was going to say, or in what might
have been said by another _Me_, whom I anticipate; (2) I announce that
some other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will have to be
substituted for the one I find before me. Now, in neither of these two
acts is there anything but affirmation. The _sui generis_ character of
negation is due to superimposing the first of these acts upon the
second. It is in vain, then, that we attribute to negation the power of
creating ideas _sui generis_, symmetrical with those that affirmation
creates, and directed in a contrary sens