nt, and can no longer be so by relation to an order of
another kind, I shall necessarily believe that the order is contingent
by relation to an _absence of itself_, that is to say by relation to a
state of things "in which there is no order at all." And this state of
things I shall believe that I am thinking of, because it is implied, it
seems, in the very contingency of order, which is an unquestionable
fact. I shall therefore place at the summit of the hierarchy the vital
order; then, as a diminution or lower complication of it, the
geometrical order; and finally, at the bottom of all, an absence of
order, incoherence itself, on which order is superposed. This is why
incoherence has the effect on me of a word behind which there must be
something real, if not in things, at least in thought. But if I observe
that the state of things implied by the contingency of a determinate
order is simply the presence of the contrary order, and if by this very
fact I posit two kinds of order, each the inverse of the other, I
perceive that no intermediate degrees can be imagined between the two
orders, and that there is no going down from the two orders to the
"incoherent." Either the incoherent is only a word, devoid of meaning,
or, if I give it a meaning, it is on condition of putting incoherence
midway between the two orders, and not below both of them. There is not
first the incoherent, then the geometrical, then the vital; there is
only the geometrical and the vital, and then, by a swaying of the mind
between them, the idea of the incoherent. To speak of an uncoordinated
diversity to which order is superadded is therefore to commit a
veritable _petitio principii_; for in imagining the uncoordinated we
really posit an order, or rather two.

* * * * *

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. It was not enough to prove that this relation between the two
terms is suggested to us, at once, by consciousness and by sensible
experience. It was necessary to prove that the geometrical order has no
need of explanation, being purely and simply the suppression of the
inverse order. And, for that, it was indispensable to prove that
suppression is always a substitution and is even necessarily conceived
as such: it is the requirements of practical life alone that suggest to
us here a way of speaking that