304 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



and not the table. The proposition, &quot; This table is not 

 white,&quot; implies that you might believe it white, that 

 you did believe it such, or that I was going to believe 

 it such. I warn you or myself that this judgment is 

 to be replaced by another (which, it is true, I leave 

 undetermined). Thus, while affirmation bears directly 

 on the thing, negation aims at the thing only in 

 directly, through an interposed affirmation. An affir 

 mative proposition expresses a judgment on an object ; 

 a negative proposition expresses a judgment on a judg 

 ment. Negation^ therefore^ differs from affirmation 

 properly so called in that it is an affirmation of the 

 second degree : it affirms something of an affirmation which 

 itself affirms something of an object. 



But it follows at once from this that negation is not 

 the work of pure mind, I should say of a mind placed 

 before objects and concerned with them alone. When 

 we deny, we give a lesson to others, or it may be to 

 ourselves. We take to task an interlocutor, real or 

 possible, whom we find mistaken and whom we put on 

 his guard. He was affirming something : we tell him 

 he ought to affirm something else (though without 

 specifying the affirmation which must be substituted). 

 There is no longer then, simply, a person and an object ; 

 there is, in face of the object, a person speaking to a 

 person, opposing him and aiding him at the same time ; 

 there is a beginning of society. Negation aims at 

 some one, and not only, like a purely intellectual 

 operation, at some thing. It is of a pedagogical and 

 social nature. It sets straight or rather warns, the 

 person warned and set straight being possibly, by a 

 kind of doubling, the very person that speaks. 



So much for the second point ; now for the first. We 

 said that negation is but the half of an intellectual 



