iv.i PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 327 



except objectify the distinction with more force, push it 

 to its extreme consequences, reduce it into a system? It 

 will therefore construct the real, on the one hand, with 

 definite Forms or immutable elements, and, on the other, 

 with a principle of mobility which, being the negation of 

 the form, will, by the hypothesis, escape all definition and be 

 the purely indeterminate. The more it directs its attention 

 to the forms delineated by thought and expressed by 

 language, the more it will see them rise above the sensible 

 and become subtilized into pure concepts, capable of enter- 

 ing one within the other, and even of being at last massed 

 together into a single concept, the synthesis of all reality, 

 the achievement of all perfection. The more, on the con- 

 trary, it descends toward the invisible source of the uni- 

 versal mobility, the more it will feel this mobility sink 

 beneath it and at the same time become void, vanish into 

 what it will call the "non-being." Finally, it will have 

 on the one hand the system of ideas, logically coordinated 

 together or concentrated into one only, on the other a 

 quasi-nought, the Platonic "non-being" or the Aristotelian 

 "matter." — But, having cut your cloth, you must sew it. 

 With supra-sensible Ideas and an infra-sensible non-being, 

 you now have to reconstruct the sensible world. You can 

 do so only if you postulate a kind of metaphysical necessity 

 in virtue of which the confronting of this All with this 

 Zero is equivalent to the affirmation of all the degrees of 

 reality that measure the interval between them — just as an 

 undivided number, when regarded as a difference between 

 itself and zero, is revealed as a certain sum of units, and 

 with its own affirmation affirms all the lower numbers. 

 That is the natural postulate. It is that also that we per- 

 ceive as the base of the Greek philosophy. In order then 

 to explain the specific characters of each of these degrees 

 of intermediate reality, nothing more is necessary than 



