190 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



one observer, as to present a remarkable example of the fixed order 

 of the world. Indeed, the Greeks thought less of natural law than of 

 fixed genera as the expression of general ideas in philosophy. Things 

 satisfied their modes of thought when they filled those places which 

 the ordinary average observation required as customary. "The 

 stone is not quite stone so long as it is not in its normal place." In 

 modern philosophy, this idea of genera is completely eclipsed by the 

 idea of law. "The laws of Kepler and Galileo have remained for it 

 the ideal and unique type of knowledge." Laws express the facts 

 of growth, change and movement much more closely than dull ideas 

 of types and genera; and yet they do not express the order of real 

 life and mobility. 



The main problem of the theory of knowledge is to explain why there 

 is any order in things. But this is much easier when we realize that 

 order is not contingent upon disorder but upon relation to an inverse 

 order. The ultimates of consciousness are space, which is the ideal 

 of detension, and duration, which is the ideal of spirit. All actual 

 experience is arrangeable in a sliding scale between these ultimates. 

 Chance and necessity seem to be contrary terms, yet in the history of 

 philosophy they are often found to be synonymous. This is because we 

 unconsciously regard phenomena as explicable from the contrasted points 

 of geometry and volition. The same thing which seems to be chance 

 or the wild and ungovernable, from the point of view of a willed or 

 moral order, is found to be inevitable from the point of view of a 

 mechanical and spatialized regularity. All order is thus contingent 

 and there cannot be a third state of things in which there is no order 

 at all, for this would not be a "state of things" but precisely no state 

 of things or a state of nothing. 



"This long analysis was necessary to show how the real can pass 

 from tension to extension and from freedom to mechanical necessity 

 by way of inversion." The geometrical order has no need of explana- 

 tion, because it is purely and simply the suppression of the inverse order. 

 In proportion as we attach ourselves to the new, the original, that 

 which has begun to be, we find matter, or the already-made, losing its 

 position — the poem and not the words and letters fill our vision. Real 



