iv THE IDEA OF NOTHING 305 



act, of which the other half is left indeterminate. If I 

 pronounce the negative proposition, &quot; This table is not 

 white/ I mean that you ought to substitute for your 

 judgment, &quot;The table is white,&quot; another judgment. I 

 give you an admonition, and the admonition refers to 

 the necessity of a substitution. As to what you ought 

 to substitute for your affirmation, I tell you nothing, it 

 is true. This may be because I do not know the colour 

 of the table ; but it is also, it is indeed even more, 

 because the white colour is that alone that interests us 

 for the moment, so that I only need to tell you that 

 some other colour will have to be substituted for 

 white, without having to say which. A negative judg 

 ment is therefore really one which indicates a need 

 of substituting for an affirmative judgment another 

 affirmative judgment, the nature of which, however, is 

 not specified, sometimes because it is not known, more 

 often because it fails to offer any actual interest, the 

 attention bearing only on the substance of the first. 



Thus, whenever I add a &quot; not &quot; to an affirmation, 

 whenever I deny, I perform two very definite acts : 

 (i) I interest myself in what one of my fellow-men 

 affirms, or in what he was going to say, or in what 

 might have been said by another Me, whom I 

 anticipate ; (2) I announce that some other affirmation, 

 whose content I do not specify, will have to be 

 substituted for the one I find before me. Now, in 

 neither of these two acts is there anything but affirma 

 tion. The sui generis character of negation is due to 

 superimposing the first of these acts upon the second. 

 It is in vain, then, that we attribute to negation the 

 power of creating ideas sui generis, symmetrical with 

 those that affirmation creates, and directed in a contrary 

 sense. No idea will come forth from negation, for it 



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