e force, push it to its extreme consequences,
reduce it into a system? It will therefore construct the real, on the
one hand, with definite Forms or immutable elements, and, on the other,
with a principle of mobility which, being the negation of the form,
will, by the hypothesis, escape all definition and be the purely
indeterminate. The more it directs its attention to the forms delineated
by thought and expressed by language, the more it will see them rise
above the sensible and become subtilized into pure concepts, capable of
entering one within the other, and even of being at last massed together
into a single concept, the synthesis of all reality, the achievement of
all perfection. The more, on the contrary, it descends toward the
invisible source of the universal mobility, the more it will feel this
mobility sink beneath it and at the same time become void, vanish into
what it will call the "non-being." Finally, it will have on the one hand
the system of ideas, logically coordinated together or concentrated into
one only, on the other a quasi-nought, the Platonic "non-being" or the
Aristotelian "matter."--But, having cut your cloth, you must sew it.
With supra-sensible Ideas and an infra-sensible non-being, you now have
to reconstruct the sensible world. You can do so only if you postulate a
kind of metaphysical necessity in virtue of which the confronting of
this All with this Zero _is equivalent_ to the affirmation of all the
degrees of reality that measure the interval between them--just as an
undivided number, when regarded as a difference between itself and zero,
is revealed as a certain sum of units, and with its own affirmation
affirms all the lower numbers. That is the natural postulate. It is that
also that we perceive as the base of the Greek philosophy. In order then
to explain the specific characters of each of these degrees of
intermediate reality, nothing more is necessary than to measure the
distance that separates it from the integral reality. Each lower degree
consists in a diminution of the higher, and the _sensible_ newness that
we perceive in it is resolved, from the point of view of the
_intelligible_, into a new quantity of negation which is superadded to
it. The smallest possible quantity of negation, that which is found
already in the highest forms of sensible reality, and consequently _a
fortiori_ in the lower forms, is that which is expressed by the most
general attributes of sensible reali