in THE GEOMETRICAL ORDER 221 



proportion as I let myself go, the successive sounds 

 will become the more individualized ; as the phrases 

 were broken into words, so the words will scan in 

 syllables which I shall perceive one after another. Let 

 me go further still in the direction of dream : the 

 letters themselves will become loose and will be seen 

 to dance along, hand in hand, on some fantastic sheet 

 of paper. I shall then admire the precision of the 

 interweavings, the marvellous order of the procession, 

 the exact insertion of the letters into the syllables, of 

 the syllables into the words and of the words into the 

 sentences. The further I pursue this quite negative 

 direction of relaxation, the more extension and com 

 plexity I shall create ; and the more the complexity in 

 its turn increases, the more admirable will seem to be 

 the order which continues to reign, undisturbed, among 

 the elements. Yet this complexity and extension repre 

 sent nothing positive ; they express a deficiency of 

 will. And, on the other hand, the order must grow 

 with the complexity, since it is only an aspect of 

 it. The more we perceive, symbolically, parts in an 

 indivisible whole, the more the number of the relations 

 that the parts have between themselves necessarily 

 increases, since the same undividedness of the real whole 

 continues to hover over the growing multiplicity of the 

 symbolic elements into which the scattering of the 

 attention has decomposed it. A comparison of this kind 

 will enable us to understand, in some measure, how the 

 same suppression of positive reality, the same inversion 

 of a certain original movement, can create at once exten 

 sion in space and the admirable order which mathematics 

 finds there. There is, of course, this difference between 

 the two cases, that words and letters have been invented 

 by a positive effort of humanity, while space arises 



