iv.j PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 315 



in fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (1) the quality, 

 (2) the form or essence, (3) the end or design (in the sense 

 of intention) of the act being performed, that is to say, at 

 bottom, the design (in the sense of drawing) of the act sup- 

 posed accomplished. These three aspects are those of tJie 

 adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond to the three 

 essential categories of language. After the explanations 

 we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, 

 translate eedos by "view" or rather by "moment." For 

 ecdos is the stable view taken of the instability of things: 

 the quality, which is a moment of becoming; the form, which 

 is a moment of evolution; the essence, which is the mean 

 form above and below which the other forms are arranged 

 as alterations of the mean ; finally, the intention or mental 

 design which presides over the action being accomplished, 

 and which is nothing else, we said, than the material design, 

 traced out and contemplated beforehand, of the action 

 accomplished. To reduce things to Ideas is therefore to 

 resolve becoming into its principal moments, each of these 

 being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws 

 of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That is to 

 say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply 

 the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the 

 analysis of the real. 



But, when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the 

 moving reality, a whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole 

 theology follows necessarily. We must insist on the point. 

 Not that we mean to summarize in a few pages a philosophy 

 so complex and so comprehensive as that of the Greeks. 

 But, since we have described the cinematographical mech- 

 anism of the intellect, it is important that we should show to 

 what idea of reality the play of this mechanism leads. It 

 is the very idea, we believe, that we find in the ancient 

 philosophy. The main lines of the doctrine that was 



