332 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



seek that which defies change, the definable quality, the 

 form or essence, the end. Such was the fundamental 

 principle of the philosophy which developed throughout 

 the classic age, the philosophy of Forms, or, to use a 

 term more akin to the Greek, the philosophy of Ideas. 



The word etSo?, which we translate here by &quot; Idea,&quot; 

 has, in fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (i) the 

 quality, (2) the form or essence, (3) the end or design 

 (in the sense of intention] of the act being performed, 

 that is to say, at bottom, the design (in the sense of 

 drawing) of the act supposed accomplished. These 

 three aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and 

 verb, and correspond to the three essential categories of 

 language. After the explanations we have given 

 above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate 

 etSo? by &quot; view &quot; or rather by &quot; moment.&quot; For eZSo? 

 is the stable view taken of the instability of things : 

 the quality, which is a moment of becoming ; the form, 

 which is a moment of evolution ; the essence, which is 

 the mean form above and below which the other forms 

 are arranged as alterations of the mean ; finally, the 

 intention or mental design which presides over the 

 action being accomplished, and which is nothing else, 

 we said, than the material design, traced out and con 

 templated beforehand, of the action accomplished. To 

 reduce things to Ideas is therefore to resolve becoming 

 into its principal moments, each of these being, more 

 over, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws of 

 time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That 

 is to say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas 

 when we apply the cinematographical mechanism of 

 the intellect to the analysis of the real. 



But, when we put immutable Ideas at the base of 

 the moving reality, a whole physics, a whole cosmology, 



