316 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



developed from Plato to Plotinus, passing through Aristotle 

 (and even, in a certain measure, through the Stoics), have 

 nothing accidental, nothing contingent, nothing that must 

 be regarded as a philosopher's fancy. They indicate the 

 vision that a systematic intellect obtains of the universal 

 becoming when regarding it by means of snapshots, taken 

 at intervals, of its flowing. So that, even to-day, we shall 

 philosophize in the manner of the Greeks, we shall re- 

 discover, without needing to know them, such and such 

 of their general conclusions, in the exact proportion that 

 we trust in the cinematographical instinct of our thought. 



We said there is more in a movement than in the suc- 

 cessive positions attributed to the moving object, more 

 in a becoming than in the forms passed through in turn, 

 more in the evolution of form than the forms assumed one 

 after another. Philosophy can therefore derive terms of 

 the second kind from those of the first, but not the first 

 from the second: from the first terms speculation must 

 take its start. But the intellect reverses the order of the 

 two groups; and, on this point, ancient philosophy pro- 

 ceeds as the intellect does. It installs itself in the im- 

 mutable, it posits only Ideas. Yet becoming exists: it 

 is a fact. How, then, having posited immutability alone, 

 shall we make change come forth from it? Not by the 

 addition of anything, for, by the hypothesis, there exists 

 nothing positive outside Ideas. It must therefore be by a 

 diminution. So at the base of ancient philosophy lies 

 necessarily this postulate: that there is more in the motion- 

 less than in the moving, and that we pass from immuta- 

 bility to becoming by way of diminution or attenuation. 



It is therefore something negative, or zero at most, that 

 must be added to Ideas to obtain change. In that consists 

 the Platonic "non-being," the Aristotelian "matter" — a 



