the indivisibility of true being, and the inflexible determinism of
successive phenomena in time simply expressed that the whole of being is
given in the eternal.

The new philosophy was going, then, to be a recommencement, or rather a
transposition, of the old. The ancient philosophy had taken each of the
_concepts_ into which a becoming is concentrated or which mark its
apogee: it supposed them all known, and gathered them up into a single
concept, form of forms, idea of ideas, like the God of Aristotle. The
new philosophy was going to take each of the _laws_ which condition a
becoming in relation to others and which are as the permanent substratum
of phenomena: it would suppose them all known, and would gather them up
into a unity which also would express them eminently, but which, like
the God of Aristotle and for the same reasons, must remain immutably
shut up in itself.

True, this return to the ancient philosophy was not without great
difficulties. When a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Plotinus melt all the
concepts of their science into a single one, in so doing they embrace
the whole of the real, for concepts are supposed to represent the things
themselves, and to possess at least as much positive content. But a law,
in general, expresses only a relation, and physical laws in particular
express only _quantitative_ relations between concrete things. So that
if a modern philosopher works with the laws of the new science as the
Greek philosopher did with the concepts of the ancient science, if he
makes all the conclusions of a physics supposed omniscient converge on a
single point, he neglects what is concrete in the phenomena--the
qualities perceived, the perceptions themselves. His synthesis
comprises, it seems, only a fraction of reality. In fact, the first
result of the new science was to cut the real into two halves, quantity
and quality, the former being credited to the account of _bodies_ and
the latter to the account of _souls_. The ancients had raised no such
barriers either between quality and quantity or between soul and body.
For them, the mathematical concepts were concepts like the others,
related to the others and fitting quite naturally into the hierarchy of
the Ideas. Neither was the body then defined by geometrical extension,
nor the soul by consciousness. If the [Greek: psyche] of Aristotle, the
entelechy of a living body, is less spiritual than our "soul," it is
because his [Greek: ooma], already