mind. So let us think of anything or let us tlunk of the totality of things, and then write in the margin of our thought the 'not,' which prescribes the rejection of what it contains: we annihilate everything mentally by the mere fact of decreeing its annihilation."— Here we have it! The very root of all the difficulties and errors with which we are confronted is to be found in the power ascribed here to negation. We represent negation as exactly symmetrical with affirmation. We imagine that negation, like affirmation, is self-sufficient. So that negation, like affirmation, would have the power of creating ideas, with this sole difference that they would be negative ideas. By affirming one thing, and then another, and so on ad infinitum, I form the idea of "All;" so, by denying one thing and then other things, finally by denying AH, I arrive at the idea of Nothing.— But it is just this assimila- tion which is arbitrary. We fail to see that while affirma- tion is a complete act of the mind, which can succeed in building up an idea, negation is but the half of an intel- lectual act, of which the other half is understood, or rather put off to an indefinite future. We fail to see that while affirmation is a purely intellectual act, there enters into negation an element which is not intellectual, and that it is precisely to the intrusion of this foreign element that negation owes its specific character.
To begin with the second point, let ua note that to
deny always consists in setting aside a possible affirmsr
tion." Negation is only an attitude taken by the mind
toward an eventual affirmation. When I say, " This
table is black," I am speaking of the table; I have seen
'Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 2nd edition, p. 727: "From the point of view of our knowledge la general . . . the pec^uliar function of negative propoisitionB ia simply U> prevent error." Ct. Sigwart, Loi/ik, 2nd edition, vol. i. pp. ISO ff.
it black, and my judgment expresses what I have seen. But if I say, "This table is not white," I surely do not express something I have perceived, for I have seen black, and not an absence of white. It is therefore, at bottom, not on the table itself that I bring this judgment to bear, but rather on the judgment that would declare the table white. I judge a judgment and not the table, The proposition, "This table is not white," implies that you might beheve it white, that you did believe it such, or that I was going to believe it such. I warn you or myself that this judgment is to be replaced by another (which, it is true, I leave undetermined). Thus, while affirmation bears directly on the thing, negation aims at the thing only indirectly, through an interposed affirmation. An affirma^ tive proposition expresses a judgment on an object; a negative proposition expresses a judgment on a judgment, Negaiion, therefore, differs from ajjirmation properly so called in that it is an affirmation of the second degree: it affirms something of an affirmation which itself affirms something of an object.
But it follows at once from this that negation is not the work of pure mind, I should say of a mind placed before objects and concerned with them alone. When we deny, we give a lesson to others, or it may be to our- selves. We take to task an interlocutor, real or possible, whom we find mistaken and whom we put on his guard. He was afiinning something: we tell him he ought to affirm something else (though without specifying the affirmatioQ which must be substituted). There is no longer then, simply, a person and an object; there is, in face of the object, a person speaking to a person, oppos- ing him and aiding him at the same time; there is a be- ginnin g of society. Negation aims at some one, and not only, like a purely intellectual operation, at some thing.
iT-l THE IDEA OF 'NOTHING' 289
It is of a pedagogical and social nature. It sets straight or rather warns, the person warned and set straight being possibly, by a kind of doubling, the very person that apeaka.
So much for the second point; now for the first. We said that negation is but the half of an intellectual act, of which the other half is left indeterminate. If I pro- nounce the negative proposition, "This table is not white," I mean that you ought to substitute for your judgment, "The table is white," another judgment. I give you an admonition, and the admonition refera to the necessity of a substitution. As to what you ought to substitute for your affirmation, I tell you nothing, it is true. This may be because I do not know the color of the table; but it is also, it is indeed even more, because the white color is that alone that interests us for the moment, so that I only need to tell you that some other color will have to be substituted for white, without having to say which. A negative judgment is therefore really one which indicates a need of substituting for an affirmative judgment another affirmative judgment, the nature of which, however, is not specified, sometimes because it is not known, more often because it fails to offer any actual interest, the attention bearing only on the substance of the first.
Thus, whenever I add a " not" to an affirmation, when- ever I deny, I perform two very definite acts: (!) I interest myself in what one of my fellow-men affirms, or in what he was going to say, or in what might have been said by an- other Me, whom I anticipate; (2) I announce that some other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will have to be substituted for the one I find before me. Now, in neither of these two acts ia there anj-thing but affirma- tion. The sui generis character of negation is due to superimposing the first of these acts upon the second.
It is in vain, then, that we attribute to negation the power of creating ideas sui generis, symmetrical with those that affirmation creates, and directed in a contrary sense. No idea will come forth from negation, for it has no other content than that of the affirmative judgment which it judges.
To be more precise, let us consider an existential, in- stead of an attributive, judgment. If I say, "The object A does not exist," I mean by that, first, that we might beheve that the object A exists: how, indeed, can we think of the object A without thinking it existing, and, once again, what difference can there be between the idea of the object A existing and the idea pure and simple of the object A? Therefore, merely by saying "The object A," I attribute to it some kind of existence, though it be that of a mere possible, that is to say, of a pure idea. And consequently, in the judgment "The object A is not," there is at first an affirmation such as "The object A has been," or "The object A will be," or, more generally, "The object A exists at least as a mere possible." Now, when I add the two words " is not," I can only mean that if we go further, if we erect the possible object into a real object, we shall be mistaken, and that the possible of which I am speaking is excluded from the actual reality as incompatible with it. Judgments that posit the non- existence of a thing are therefore judgments that formu- late a contrast between the possible and the actual (that is, between two kinds of existence, one thought and the other found), where a person, real or imaginary, wrongly believes that a certain possible is realized. Instead of this possible, there is a reality that differs from it and re- jects it: the negative judgment expresses this contrast, but it expresses the contrast in an intentionally incomplete form, because it is addressed to a person who is sup-
posed to be interested exclusively in the possible that is indicated, and is not concerned to know by what kind of reality the possible is replaced. The expression of the substitution is therefore bound to be cut short. In- stead of affirming that a second term is substituted for the first, the attention which was originally directed to the first tenn will be kept fixed upon it, and upon it alone. And, without going beyond the first, we shall implicitly affirm that a second term replaces it in saying that the first "is not." We shall thus judge a judgment instead of jud^ng a thing. We shall warn others or warn our- selves of a possible error instead of supplying positive information. Suppress every mtention of this kind, give knowledge back its exclusively scientific or philosophical character, suppose in other words that reality comes itself to inscribe itself on a mind that cares only for things and is not interested in persons; we shall affirm that such or such a thing is, we shall never aflirm that a thing is not.
How comes it, then, that affirmation and negation are so persistently put on the same level and endowed with an equal objectivity? How comes it that we have so much difficulty in recognizing that negation is sub- jective, artificially cut short, relative to the human mind and still more to the social Lfe? The reason is, no doubt, th&tboth negation and affirmation are expressed in propo- sitions, and that any proposition, being formed of words, which symbolize concepts, is something relative to social life and to the hxunan intellect. Whether I say "The ground is damp" or "The ground is not damp," in both cases the terms "ground" and "damp" are concepts more or less artificially created by the mind of man — extracted, by his free initiative, from the continuity of experience. In both cases the concepts are represented by the same conventioDal words. In both cases we can say indeed
292 Creative Evolution
that the proposition aims at a social and pedagogical end, since the first would propagate a truth as the second would prevent an error. From this point of view, which is that of formal logic, to affirm and to deny are indeed two mutually symmetrical acts, of which the first estab- lishes a relation of agreement and the second a relation of disagreement between a subject and an attribute. But how do we fail to see that the symmetry is altogether external and the likeness superficial? Suppose language fallen into disuse, society dissolved, every intellectual initiative, every faculty of self-reflection and of self- judgment atrophied in man: the dampness of the ground will subsist none the less, capable of inscribing itself auto- matically in sensation and of sending a vague idea to the deadened intellect. The intellect will still affirm, in implicit terms. And consequently, neither distinct concepts, nor words, nor the desire of spreading the truth, nor that of bettering oneself, are of the very essence of the affirmation. But this passive intelligence, mechanically keeping step with experience, neither anticipating nor following the course of the real, would have no wish to deny. It could not receive an imprint of negation; for, once again, that which exists may come to be recorded, but the non-ex- istence of the non-existing cannot. For such an intellect to reach the point of denying, it must awake from its torpor, formulate the disappoiatment of a real or possible expect- ation, correct an actual or possible error — in short, propose to teach others or to teach itself.
It is rather difficult to perceive this in the example we have chosen, but the example is indeed the more in- structive and the argument the more cogent on that account. If dampness is able automatically to come and record itself, it is the same, it will be said, with non-damp- nesa; for the dry as well as the damp can give impressions
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