hered along the course of time; and, just because we
have cut the thread that binds them to time, they no longer endure. They
tend to withdraw into their own definition, that is to say, into the
artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their
intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what
is eternal in them is just what is unreal. On the contrary, if we treat
becoming by the cinematographical method, the Forms are no longer
snapshots taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements, they
represent all that is positive in Becoming. Eternity no longer hovers
over time, as an abstraction; it underlies time, as a reality. Such is
exactly, on this point, the attitude of the philosophy of Forms or
Ideas. It establishes between eternity and time the same relation as
between a piece of gold and the small change--change so small that
payment goes on for ever without the debt being paid off. The debt could
be paid at once with the piece of gold. It is this that Plato expresses
in his magnificent language when he says that God, unable to make the
world eternal, gave it Time, "a moving image of eternity."[100]

Hence also arises a certain conception of extension, which is at the
base of the philosophy of Ideas, although it has not been so explicitly
brought out. Let us imagine a mind placed alongside becoming, and
adopting its movement. Each successive state, each quality, each form,
in short, will be seen by it as a mere cut made by thought in the
universal becoming. It will be found that form is essentially extended,
inseparable as it is from the extensity of the becoming which has
materialized it in the course of its flow. Every form thus occupies
space, as it occupies time. But the philosophy of Ideas follows the
inverse direction. It starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very
essence of reality. It does not take Form as a snapshot of becoming; it
posits Forms in the eternal; of this motionless eternity, then, duration
and becoming are supposed to be only the degradation. Form thus posited,
independent of time, is then no longer what is found in a perception; it
is a _concept_. And, as a reality of the conceptual order occupies no
more of extension than it does of duration, the Forms must be stationed
outside space as well as above time. Space and time have therefore
necessarily, in ancient philosophy, the same origin and the same value.
The same diminution of being is