314 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



by making cross cuts therein in thought. The reason 

 is that there is more in the transition than the series of 

 states, that is to say, the possible cuts — more in the move- 

 ment than the series of positions, that is to say, the possible 

 stops. Only, the first way of looking at things is con- 

 formable to the processes of the human mind; the second 

 requires, on the contrary, that we reverse the bent of our 

 intellectual habits. No wonder, then, if philosophy at first 

 recoiled before such an effort. The Greeks trusted to nature, 

 trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language 

 above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. 

 Rather than lay blame on the attitude of thought and 

 language toward the course of things, they preferred to 

 pronounce the course of things itself to be wrong. 



Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philoso- 

 phers of the Eleatic school. And they passed it with- 

 out any reservation whatever. As becoming shocks the 

 habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language, 

 they declared it unreal. In spatial movement and in 

 change in general they saw only pure illusion. This con- 

 clusion could be softened down without changing the 

 premisses, by saying that the reality changes, but that it 

 ought not to change. Experience confronts us with be- 

 coming: that is sensible reality. But the intelligible reality, 

 that which ought to be, is more real still, and that reality 

 does not change. Beneath the qualitative becoming, 

 beneath the evolutionary becoming, beneath the extensive 

 becoming, the mind must seek that which defies change, 

 the definable quality, the form or essence, the end. Such 

 was the fundamental principle of the philosophy which 

 developed throughout the classic age, the philosophy of 

 Forms, or, to use a term more akin to the Greek, the philoso- 

 phy of Ideas. 



The word etdos, which we translate here by "Idea," has, 



