in IDEAL GENESIS OF MATTER 249 



necessarily believe that the order is contingent by 

 relation to an absence of itself, that is to say by relation 

 to a state of things &quot; in which there is no order at all.&quot; 

 And this state of things I shall believe that I am 

 thinking of, because it is implied, it seems, in the very 

 contingency of order, which is an unquestionable fact. 

 I shall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy 

 the vital order ; then, as a diminution or lower 

 complication of it, the geometrical order ; and finally, 

 at the bottom of all, an absence of order, incoherence 

 itself, on which order is superposed. This is why 

 incoherence has the effect on me of a word behind which 

 there must be something real, if not in things, at least in 

 thought. But if I observe that the state of things implied 

 by the contingency of a determinate order is simply 

 the presence of the contrary order, and if by this very 

 fact I posit two kinds of order, each the inverse of the 

 other, I perceive that no intermediate degrees can be 

 imagined between the two orders, and that there is no 

 going down from the two orders to the &quot; incoherent.&quot; 

 Either the incoherent is only a word, devoid of meaning, 

 or, if I give it a meaning, it is on condition of putting 

 incoherence midway between the two orders, and not 

 below both of them. There is not first the in 

 coherent, then the geometrical, then the vital ; there is 

 only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a 

 swaying of the mind between them, the idea of the 

 incoherent. To speak of an uncoordinated diversity 

 to which order is superadded is therefore to commit a 

 veritable petitio principii ; for in imagining the unco 

 ordinated we really posit an order, or rather two. 



This long analysis was necessary to show how the 

 real can pass from tension to extension and from 



