osed accomplished. _These three
aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond
to the three essential categories of language._ After the explanations
we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate
[Greek: eidos] by "view" or rather by "moment." For [Greek: eidos] is
the stable view taken of the instability of things: the _quality_, which
is a moment of becoming; the _form_, which is a moment of evolution; the
_essence_, which is the mean form above and below which the other forms
are arranged as alterations of the mean; finally, the intention or
_mental design_ which presides over the action being accomplished, and
which is nothing else, we said, than the _material design_, traced out
and contemplated beforehand, of the action accomplished. To reduce
things to Ideas is therefore to resolve becoming into its principal
moments, each of these being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from
the laws of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That is to
say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the
cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the
real.

But, when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the moving reality, a
whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole theology follows necessarily.
We must insist on the point. Not that we mean to summarize in a few
pages a philosophy so complex and so comprehensive as that of the
Greeks. But, since we have described the cinematographical mechanism of
the intellect, it is important that we should show to what idea of
reality the play of this mechanism leads. It is the very idea, we
believe, that we find in the ancient philosophy. The main lines of the
doctrine that was developed from Plato to Plotinus, passing through
Aristotle (and even, in a certain measure, through the Stoics), have
nothing accidental, nothing contingent, nothing that must be regarded as
a philosopher's fancy. They indicate the vision that a systematic
intellect obtains of the universal becoming when regarding it by means
of snapshots, taken at intervals, of its flowing. So that, even to-day,
we shall philosophize in the manner of the Greeks, we shall rediscover,
without needing to know them, such and such of their general
conclusions, in the exact proportion that we trust in the
cinematographical instinct of our thought.

* * * * *

We said there is _more_ in a movement than in the successiv