iv PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 341 



philosophers never formulated it explicitly. They 

 confined themselves to drawing the consequences of it, 

 and, in general, they have marked but points of view 

 of it rather than presented it itself. Sometimes, indeed, 

 they speak of an attraction, sometimes of an impulsion 

 exercised by the prime mover on the whole of the 

 world. Both views are found in Aristotle, who shows 

 us in the movement of the universe an aspiration of 

 things toward the divine perfection, and consequently 

 an ascent toward God, while he describes it elsewhere 

 as the effect of a contact of God with the first 

 sphere and as descending, consequently, from God to 

 things. The Alexandrians, we think, do no more 

 than follow this double indication when they speak 

 of procession and conversion. Everything is derived 

 from the first principle, and everything aspires to 

 return to it. But these two conceptions of the divine 

 causality can only be identified together if we bring 

 them, both the one and the other, back to a third, which 

 we hold to be fundamental, and which alone will enable 

 us to understand, not only why, in what sense, things 

 move in space and time, but also why there is space and 

 time, why there is movement, why there are things. 



This conception, which more and more shows 

 through the reasonings of the Greek philosophers as we 

 go from Plato to Plotinus, we may formulate thus : 

 The affirmation of a reality implies the simultaneous 

 affirmation of all the degrees of reality intermediate between 

 it and nothing. The principle is evident in the case of 

 number : we cannot affirm the number 10 without 

 thereby affirming the existence of the numbers 9, 8, 7, 

 . . ., etc. in short, of the whole interval between 10 

 and zero. But here our mind passes naturally from the 

 sphere of quantity to that of quality. It seems to us 



