iv PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 337 



in order to regain its natural stability. Bring it 

 back to its normal position : space, time and motion 

 shrink to a mathematical point. Just so, human 

 reasonings are drawn out into an endless chain, 

 but are at once swallowed up in the truth seized 

 by intuition, for their extension in space and time 

 is only the distance, so to speak, between thought 

 and truth. 1 So of extension and duration in relation 

 to pure Forms or Ideas. The sensible forms are 

 before us, ever about to recover their ideality, ever 

 prevented by the matter they bear in them, that is to 

 say, by their inner void, by the interval between what 

 they are and what they ought to be. They are for 

 ever on the point of recovering themselves, for ever 

 occupied in losing themselves. An inflexible law 

 condemns them, like the rock of Sisyphus, to fall 

 back when they are almost touching the summit, and 

 this law, which has projected them into space and time, 

 is nothing other than the very constancy of their 

 original insufficiency. The alternations of generation 

 and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and 

 over again, the infinite repetition of the cycles of 

 celestial spheres this all represents merely a certain 

 fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill 

 up this deficit : at once you suppress space and time, 

 that is to say, the endlessly renewed oscillations around 

 a stable equilibrium always aimed at, never reached. 

 Things re-enter into each other. What was extended 

 in space is contracted into pure Form. And past, 

 present, and future shrink into a single moment, 

 which is eternity. 



1 We have tried to bring out what is true and what false in this idea, 

 so far as spatiality is concerned (see Chapter III.). It seems to us radically 

 false as regards duration 



Z 



