iv.i THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 279 



the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish this 

 inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an 

 imaginary self which now perceives as an external object 

 the self that is dying away. Be it external or internal, 

 some object there always is that my imagination is repre- 

 senting. My imagination, it is true, can go from one to 

 the other, I can by turns imagine a nought of external 

 perception or a nought of internal perception, but not both 

 at once, for the absence of one consists, at bottom, in the 

 exclusive presence of the other. But, from the fact that 

 two relative noughts are imaginable in turn, we wrongly 

 conclude that they are imaginable together: a conclusion 

 the absurdity of which must be obvious, for we cannot 

 imagine a nought without perceiving, at least confusedly, 

 that we are imagining it, consequently that we are acting, 

 that we are thinking, and therefore that something still 

 subsists. 



The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression 

 of everything is never formed by thought. The effort 

 by which we strive to create this image simply ends in 

 making us swing to and fro between the vision of an outer 

 and that of an inner reality. In this coming and going 

 of our mind between the without and the within, there is 

 a point, at equal distance from both, in which it seems to 

 us that we no longer perceive the one, and that we do not 

 yet perceive the other: it is there that the image of 

 "Nothing" is formed. In reality, we then perceive both, 

 having reached the point where the two terms come to- 

 gether, and the image of Nothing, so defined, is an image 

 full of things, an image that includes at once that of the 

 subject and that of the object and, besides, a perpetual 

 leaping from one to the other and the refusal ever to come 

 to rest finally on either. Evidently this is not the nothing 

 that we can oppose to being, and put before or be- 



