iv PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 331 



is obscure, all is contradictory when we try, with states, 

 to build up a transition. The obscurity is cleared up, 

 the contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves 

 along the transition, in order to distinguish states in it 

 by making cross cuts therein in thought. The reason 

 is that there is more in the transition than the series of 

 states, that is to say, the possible cuts, more in the 

 movement than the series of positions, that is to say, 

 the possible stops. Only, the first way of looking at 

 things is conformable to the processes of the human 

 mind ; the second requires, on the contrary, that we 

 reverse the bent of our intellectual habits. No wonder, 

 then, if philosophy at first recoiled before such an 

 effort. The Greeks trusted to nature, trusted the 

 natural propensity of the mind, trusted language above 

 all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. 

 Rather than lay blame on the attitude of thought 



J o 



and language toward the course of things, they pre 

 ferred to pronounce the course of things itself to be 

 wrong. 



Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philo 

 sophers of the Eleatic school. And they passed it with 

 out any reservation whatever. As becoming shocks 

 the habits of thought and fits ill into the moulds of 

 language, they declared it unreal. In spatial movement 

 and in change in general they saw only pure illusion. 

 This conclusion could be softened down without chang 

 ing the premisses, by saying that the reality changes, 

 but that it ought not to change. Experience confronts 

 us with becoming : that is sensible reality. But the 

 intelligible reality, that which ought to be, is more real 

 still, and that reality does not change. Beneath the 

 qualitative becoming, beneath the evolutionary becom 

 ing, beneath the extensive becoming, the mind must 



