iv.i PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 319 



are but the distance between what is and what ought to be. 

 From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, space and 

 time can be nothing but the field that an incomplete reality, 

 or rather a reality that has gone astray from itself, needs in 

 order to run in quest of itself. Only it must be admitted 

 that the field is created as the hunting progresses, and that 

 the hunting in some way deposits the field beneath it. 

 Move an imaginary pendulum, a mere mathematical point, 

 from its position of equilibrium: a perpetual oscillation 

 is started, along which points are placed next to points, 

 and moments succeed moments. The space and time 

 which thus arise have no more "positivity" than the move- 

 ment itself. They represent the remoteness of the position 

 artificially given to the pendulum from its normal position, 

 what it lacks in order to regain its natural stability. Bring 

 it back to its normal position: space, time and motion 

 shrink to a mathematical point. Just so, human reason- 

 ings are drawn out into an endless chain, but are at once 

 swallowed up in the truth seized by intuition, for their 

 extension in space and time is only the distance, so to speak, 

 between thought and truth. 1 So of extension and duration 

 in relation to pure Forms or Ideas. The sensible forms are 

 before us, ever about to recover their ideality, ever pre- 

 vented by the matter they bear in them, that is to say, by 

 their inner void, by the interval between what they are and 

 what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point 

 of recovering themselves, for ever occupied in losing them- 

 selves. An inflexible law condemns them, like the rock of 

 Sisyphus, to fall back when they are almost touching the 

 summit, and this law, which has projected them into space 

 and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their 



1 We have tried to bring out what is true and what is false in this idea, 

 so far as spatiality is concerned (see Chapter III.). It seems to us 

 radically false as regards duration. 



