w, if Mons.
Jourdain heard me, he would infer, no doubt, from my two exclamations
that prose and poetry are two forms of language reserved for books, and
that these learned forms have come and overlaid a language which was
neither prose nor verse. Speaking of this thing which is neither verse
nor prose, he would suppose, moreover, that he was thinking of it: it
would be only a pseudo-idea, however. Let us go further still: the
pseudo-idea would create a pseudo-problem, if M. Jourdain were to ask
his professor of philosophy how the prose form and the poetry form have
been superadded to that which possessed neither the one nor the other,
and if he wished the professor to construct a theory of the imposition
of these two forms upon this formless matter. His question would be
absurd, and the absurdity would lie in this, that he was hypostasizing
as the substratum of prose and poetry the simultaneous negation of both,
forgetting that the negation of the one consists in the affirmation of
the other.

Now, suppose that there are two species of order, and that these two
orders are two contraries within one and the same genus. Suppose also
that the idea of disorder arises in our mind whenever, seeking one of
the two kinds of order, we find the other. The idea of disorder would
then have a clear meaning in the current practice of life: it would
objectify, for the convenience of language, the disappointment of a mind
that finds before it an order different from what it wants, an order
with which it is not concerned at the moment, and which, in this sense,
does not exist for it. But the idea would not admit a theoretical use.
So if we claim, notwithstanding, to introduce it into philosophy, we
shall inevitably lose sight of its true meaning. It denotes the absence
of a certain order, but _to the profit of another_ (with which we are
not concerned); only, as it applies to each of the two in turn, and as
it even goes and comes continually between the two, we take it on the
way, or rather on the wing, like a shuttlecock between two battledores,
and treat it as if it represented, not the absence of the one or other
order as the case may be, but the absence of both together--a thing that
is neither perceived nor conceived, a simple verbal entity. So there
arises the problem how order is imposed on disorder, form on matter. In
analyzing the idea of disorder thus subtilized, we shall see that it
represents nothing at all, and at the same