PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 



333 



a whole theology follows necessarily. We must insist 

 on the point. Not that we mean to summarize in 

 a few pages a philosophy so complex and so com 

 prehensive as that of the Greeks. But, since we 

 have described the cinematographical mechanism of 

 the intellect, it is important that we should show to 

 what idea of reality the play of this mechanism leads. 

 It is the very idea, we believe, that we find in the 

 ancient philosophy. The main lines of the doctrine 

 that was developed from Plato to Plotinus, passing 

 through Aristotle (and even, in a certain measure, 

 through the Stoics), have nothing accidental, nothing 

 contingent, nothing that must be regarded as a philo 

 sopher s fancy. They indicate the vision that a 

 systematic intellect obtains of the universal becoming 

 when regarding it by means of snapshots, taken at 

 intervals, of its flowing. So that, even to-day, we 

 shall philosophize in the manner of the Greeks, we 

 shall rediscover, without needing to know them, such 

 and such of their general conclusions, in the exact 

 proportion that we trust in the cinematographical 

 instinct of our thought. 



We said there is more in a movement than in the 

 successive positions attributed to the moving object, 

 more in a becoming than in the forms passed through 

 in turn, more in the evolution of form than the forms 

 assumed one after another. Philosophy can therefore 

 derive terms of the second kind from those of the 

 first, but not the first from the second : from the first 

 terms speculation must take its start. But the intellect 

 reverses the order of the two groups ; and, on this 

 point, ancient philosophy proceeds as the intellect does. 

 It installs itself in the immutable, it posits only Ideas. 



