iv PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 345 



mobility which, just because it is always unexpressed, 

 is thought to remain in all cases the same. Then 

 comes in a philosophy that holds the dissociation thus 

 effected by thought and language to be legitimate. 

 What can it do, except objectify the distinction with 

 more force, push it to its extreme consequences, reduce 

 it into a system ? It will therefore construct the real, 

 on the one hand, with definite Forms or immutable 

 elements, and, on the other, with a principle of mobility 

 which, being the negation of the form, will, by the 

 hypothesis, escape all definition and be the purely in 

 determinate. The more it directs its attention to the 

 forms delineated by thought and expressed by language, 

 the more it will see them rise above the sensible and 

 become subtilised into pure concepts, capable of entering 

 one within the other, and even of being at last massed 

 together into a single concept, the synthesis of all reality, 

 the achievement of all perfection. The more, on the 

 contrary, it descends toward the invisible source of the 

 universal mobility, the more it will feel this mobility 

 sink beneath it and at the same time become void, 

 vanish into what it will call the &quot; non-being.&quot; Finally, 

 it will have on the one hand the system of ideas, logically 

 coordinated together or concentrated into one only, on 

 the other a quasi-nought, the Platonic &quot; non-being &quot; or 

 the Aristotelian &quot; matter.&quot; But, having cut your cloth, 

 you must sew it. With supra-sensible Ideas and an 

 infra-sensible non-being, you now have to reconstruct 

 the sensible world. You can do so only if you postulate 

 a kind of metaphysical necessity in virtue of which the 

 confronting of this All with this Zero is equivalent to 

 the affirmation of all the degrees of reality that measure 

 the interval between them, just as an undivided 

 number, when regarded as a difference between itself 



