302 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



only in relation to a reality that drives into the region 

 of the ideal, or of the merely possible, the object which 

 is incompatible with it. Suppose the stronger and more 

 substantial existence annihilated : it is the attenuated 

 and weaker existence of the merely possible that 

 becomes the reality itself, and you will no longer be 

 representing the object, then, as non-existent. In other 

 words, and however strange our assertion may seem, 

 there is more, and not less, in the idea of an object con 

 ceived as &quot; not existing &quot; than in the idea of this same 

 object conceived as &quot;existing&quot; ; for the idea of the object 

 &quot; not existing &quot; is necessarily the idea of the object &quot; exist 

 ing &quot; with) in addition, the representation of an exclusion 

 of this object by the actual reality taken in block. 



But it will be claimed that our idea of the non 

 existent is not yet sufficiently cut loose from every 

 imaginative element, that it is not negative enough. 

 &amp;lt;c No matter,&quot; we shall be told, &quot;though the unreality 

 of a thing consist in its exclusion by other things ; we 

 want to know nothing about that. Are we not free to 

 direct our attention where we please and how we 

 please ? Well then, after having called up the idea of 

 an object, and thereby, if you will have it so, supposed 

 it existent, we shall merely couple to our affirmation a 

 c not, and that will be enough to make us think it 

 non-existent. This is an operation entirely intellectual, 

 independent of what happens outside the mind. So let 

 us think of anything or let us think of the totality of 

 things, and then write in the margin of our thought 

 the not which prescribes the rejection of what it 

 contains : we annihilate everything mentally by the 

 mere fact of decreeing its annihilation.&quot;- Here we 

 have it ! The very root of all the difficulties and 

 errors with which we are confronted is to be found in 



