Hence, throughout the whole philosophy of Ideas there is a certain conception of duration, as also of the relation of time to eternity. He who installs himself in becoming sees in duration the very life of things, the fundamental reality. The Forms, which the mind isolates and stores up in concepts, are then only snapshots of the changing reaUty. They are moments gathered along the course of time; and, just because we have cut the thread that binds them to time, they no longer endure. They tend to withdraw into their owti definition, that is to say, into the artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what is eternal in them is just what is un- real. On the contrary, if we treat becoming by the cine- matographical method, the Forms are no longer snapshots taken of the change, they are its constitutive elements, they represent all that is positive in Becoming. Eternity no longer hovers over time, as an abstraction; it underhes
time, as a reality. Such 19 exactly, on this point, the atti- tude of the philosophy of Forms or Ideas. It establishes between eternity and time the same relation as between a piece of gold and the small change — change bo small that payment goes on for ever without the debt being paid off. The debt could be paid at once with the piece of gold. It is this that Plato expresses in his magnificent language when he says that God, unable to make the world eternal, gave it Time, "a moving image of eternity,"'
Hence also arises a certain conception of extension, which is at the base of the philosophy of Ideas, although it has not been so explicitly brought out. Let us imagine a mind placed alongside becoming, and adopting its move- ment. Each successive state, each quality, each form, in short, will be seen by it as a mere cut made by thought in the universal becoming. It will be found that form is essentially extended, inseparable as it is from the extenaity of the becoming which has materialized it in the course of its flow. Every form thus occupies space, as it occupies time. But the philosophy of Ideas follows the inverse direction. It starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very essence of reality. It does not take Form as a snap- shot of becoming; it posits Forms in the eternal; of this motionless eternity, then, duration and becoming are sup- posed to be only the degradation. Form thus posited, in- dependent of time, is then no longer what is found in a perception; it is a concept. And, as a reality of the con- ceptual order occupies no more of extension than it does of duration, the Forms must be stationed outside space as well as above time. Space and time have therefore neces- sarily, in ancient philosophy, the same origin and the same value. The same diminution of being is expressed both by extension in space and detention in time. Both of these > Plato, Timaeui, 37 o.
iT.i PLATO AND ARISTOTLE 319
are but the distance between what ia 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 arc 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.' So of extension and duration in relation to pure Forms or Ideas. The sensible forma 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
< We b»ve tried to bring out what U true and what is f»tse in tbia idea, ■0 far as spatialitj' ia nincerned (see Chapter III.). It wenu to ua ndically false as regards duralion.
ori^nal iiisufiBcieDcy. The alternations of generation and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition of the cycles of celestial spheres — this all represents merely a certain fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium alwaj-s aimed at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. And past, present, and future shrink into a single moment, which is eternity.
This amounts to saying that physics is but logic spoiled. In this proposition the whole philosophy of Ideas is sum- marized. And in it also is the hidden principle of the philosophy that is inna.te in our understanding. If im- mutability is more than becoming, form is more than change, and it is by a veritable fall that the logical system of Ideas, rationally subordinated and coordinated among themselves, is scattered into a physical scries of objects and events accidentally placed one after another. The genera- tive idea of a poem is developed in thousands of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themseives out in words. And the more we descend from the motion- less idea, wound on itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. Ail these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore per- ceives only accidents. But our mind, by successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of words — accidents called up by accidents— to the con-
ception of the Idea that posits its own being. So the philosopher proceeds, confronted with the universe. Ex- perience makes to pass before his eyes phenomena which run, they also, one behind another in an accidental order determined by circumstances of time and place. This physical order — a degeneration of the logical order — ia nothing else but the fall of the logical into space and time. But the pliilosopher, ascending again from the percept to the concept, sees condensed into the logical aO the positive reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable system of Ideas. Thus Science is obtained, which appears to us, complete and ready-made, as soon as we put back our intellect into its true place, correcting the de'viation that separated it from the in- telligible. Science ia not, then, a human construction. It is prior to our intellect, independent of it, veritably the generator of Things.
And indeed, if we hold the Forms to be simply snapshots taken by the mind of the continuity of becoming, they must be relative to the mind that thinks them, they can have no independent existence. At most we might say that each of these Ideas is an ideal. But it is in the opposite hypothe- sis that we are placing ourselves. Ideas must then exist by themselves. Ancient philosophy could not escape this conclusion. Plato formulated it, aod in vain did Aristotle strive to avoid it. Since movement arises from the de- gradation of the immutable, there could be no movement, consequently no sensible world, if there were not, some- where, immutabihty realized. So, having begun by refus- ing to Ideas an independent existence, and finding himself nevertheless unable to deprive them of it, Aristotle pressed them into each other, rolled them up into a ball, and set above the physical world a Form that was thus found to be
322 CREATIVE EVOLUTION nmFf
the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his own words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the God of Aristotle — necessarily immutable and apart from what is happening in the world, since he is only the sjTithesis of all concepts in a single concept. It is true that no one of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in the divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of Plato within the God of Aristotle. But if only we im- agine the God of Aristotle in a sort of refraction of him- self, or simply incliniog toward the world, at once the Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, as if they were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays stream out from the sun, which nevertheless did not contain them. It is probably this possibility of an ovipouring of Platonic Ideas from the Aristotehan God that is meant, in the philosophy of Aristotle, by the active intellect, the vatji that has been called to(^t«m — that is, by what ia essential and yet unconscious in human intelligence. The vo5* 7!Ofi)^tK6i is Science entire, posited all at once, which the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to re- construct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then with- in us, or rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as the Alexandrians said, a vision always virtual, never actually realized by the conscious intellect. In this in- tuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it is that "does everything,"' playing in relation to the dis- cursive intellect, which moves in time, the same rfile as the motionless Mover himself plays in relation to the movement of the heavens and the course of things.
There is, then, immanent in the philosophy of Ideas, a particular conception of causality, which it is important
' AriBtotle, De anima, 430 a 14 Koi larcu 6 fiiu toiouzos voiji tu) riuTo. ffiisadoi, 6 de T(fi K&ura nocs^v, oii if(» rm, otov t6 ipw». ■tpoT^ou yap tMt Ka rf iptiia icoiit m d{judfi£i m/xa ;[p<ijna7a ivipyua xfiwfata.
to bring into full light, because it is that which each of us will reach when, in order to ascend to the origin of things, he follows to the end the natural movement of the intellect. True, the ancient philosophers never formulated it ex- phcitly. They confined themselves to drawing the con- sequences of it, and, in general, they have marked but points of view of it rather than presented it itself. Some- times, indeed, they speak of an attraclion, sometimes of an impulsion exercised by the prime mover on the whole of the world. Both views arc found in Aristotle, who shows us in the movement of the universe an aspiration of things toward the divine perfection, and consequently an ascent toward God, while he describes it elsewhere as the effect of a contact of God with the first sphere and as descending, consequently, from God to things. The Alexandrians, we think, do no more than follow this double indication when they speak of procession and conversion. Everything is derived from the first principle, and everything aspires to return to it. But these two conceptions of the divine causality can only be identified together if we bring them, both the one and the other, back to a third, which we hold to be fundamental, and which alone will enable us to under- stand, not only why, in what sense, things move in space and time, but also why there is space and time, why there is movement, why there are things.