in THE IDEA OF DISORDER 



235 



it applies to each of the two in turn, and as it even 

 goes and comes continually between the two, we take 

 it on the way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock 

 between two battledores, and treat it as if it represented, 

 not the absence of the one or other order as the case 

 may be, but the absence of both together a thing that 

 is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal 

 entity. So there arises the problem how order is 

 imposed on disorder, form on matter. In analysing 

 the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that 

 it represents nothing at all, and at the same time the 

 problems that have been raised around it will vanish. 



It is true that we must begin by distinguishing, 

 and even by opposing one to the other, two kinds of 

 order which we generally confuse. As this confusion 

 has created the principal difficulties of the problem of 

 knowledge, it will not be useless to dwell once more 

 on the marks by which the two orders are distinguished. 



In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the 

 degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is 

 therefore a certain agreement between subject and object. 

 It is the mind finding itself again in things. But the 

 mind, we said, can go in two opposite ways. Sometimes 

 it follows its natural direction : there is then progress in 

 the form of tension, continuous creation, free activity. 

 Sometimes it inverts it, and this inversion, pushed to 

 the end, leads to extension, to the necessary reciprocal 

 determination of elements externalised each by relation 

 to the others, in short, to geometrical mechanism. 

 Now, whether experience seems to us to adopt the 

 first direction or whether it is drawn in the direction 

 of the second, in both cases we say there is order, 

 for in the two processes the mind finds itself again. 

 The confusion between them is therefore natural. To 



