tters themselves will become loose and will be
seen to dance along, hand in hand, on some fantastic sheet of paper. I
shall then admire the precision of the interweavings, the marvelous
order of the procession, the exact insertion of the letters into the
syllables, of the syllables into the words and of the words into the
sentences. The farther I pursue this quite negative direction of
relaxation, the more extension and complexity I shall create; and the
more the complexity in its turn increases, the more admirable will seem
to be the order which continues to reign, undisturbed, among the
elements. Yet this complexity and extension represent nothing positive;
they express a deficiency of will. And, on the other hand, the order
must grow with the complexity, since it is only an aspect of it. The
more we perceive, symbolically, parts in an indivisible whole, the more
the number of the relations that the parts have between themselves
necessarily increases, since the same undividedness of the real whole
continues to hover over the growing multiplicity of the symbolic
elements into which the scattering of the attention has decomposed it. A
comparison of this kind will enable us to understand, in some measure,
how the same suppression of positive reality, the same inversion of a
certain original movement, can create at once extension in space and the
admirable order which mathematics finds there. There is, of course, this
difference between the two cases, that words and letters have been
invented by a positive effort of humanity, while space arises
automatically, as the remainder of a subtraction arises once the two
numbers are posited.[80] But, in the one case as in the other, the
infinite complexity of the parts and their perfect coordination among
themselves are created at one and the same time by an inversion which
is, at bottom, an interruption, that is to say, a diminution of positive
reality.

* * * * *

All the operations of our intellect tend to geometry, as to the goal
where they find their perfect fulfilment. But, as geometry is
necessarily prior to them (since these operations have not as their end
to construct space and cannot do otherwise than take it as given) it is
evident that it is a latent geometry, immanent in our idea of space,
which is the main spring of our intellect and the cause of its working.
We shall be convinced of this if we consider the two essential functions
of