it. I THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 287 



mind. So let us think of anything or let us think of the 

 totality of things, and then write in the margin of our 

 thought the 'not,' which prescribes the rejection of what it 

 contains: we annihilate everything mentally by the 

 mere fact of decreeing its annihilation." — Here we have 

 it! The very root of all the difficulties and errors with 

 which we are confronted is to be found in the power ascribed 

 here to negation. We represent negation as exactly 

 symmetrical with affirmation. We imagine that negation, 

 like affirmation, is self-sufficient. So that negation, like 

 affirmation, would have the power of creating ideas, with 

 this sole difference that they would be negative ideas. 

 By affirming one thing, and then another, and so on ad 

 infinitum, I form the idea of "All;" so, by denying one 

 thing and then other things, finally by denying All, I 

 arrive at the idea of Nothing. — But it is just this assimila- 

 tion which is arbitrary. We fail to see that while affirma- 

 tion is a complete act of the mind, which can succeed in 

 building up an idea, negation is but the half of an intel- 

 lectual act, of which the other half is understood, or rather 

 put off to an indefinite future. We fail to see that while 

 affirmation is a purely intellectual act, there enters into 

 negation an element which is not intellectual, and that it 

 is precisely to the intrusion of this foreign element that 

 negation owes its specific character. 



To begin with the second point, let us note that to 

 deny always consists in setting aside a possible affirma- 

 tion. 1 Negation is only an attitude taken by the mind 

 toward an eventual affirmation. When I say, "This 

 table is black," I am speaking of the table; I have seen 



> Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edition, p. 737: "From the point 

 of view of our knowledge in general . . . the peculiar function of 

 negative propositions is simply to prevent error." Cf. Sigwart, Logik, 

 2nd edition, vol. i. pp. 150 ff. 



