tial
nothingness is therefore formed here in the course of the substitution
of one thing for another, whenever this substitution is thought by a
mind that would prefer to keep the old thing in the place of the new, or
at least conceives this preference as possible. The idea implies on the
subjective side a preference, on the objective side a substitution, and
is nothing else but a combination of, or rather an interference between,
this feeling of preference and this idea of substitution.

Such is the mechanism of the operation by which our mind annihilates an
object and succeeds in representing in the external world a partial
nought. Let us now see how it represents it within itself. We find in
ourselves phenomena that are produced, and not phenomena that are not
produced. I experience a sensation or an emotion, I conceive an idea, I
form a resolution: my consciousness perceives these facts, which are so
many _presences_, and there is no moment in which facts of this kind are
not present to me. I can, no doubt, interrupt by thought the course of
my inner life; I may suppose that I sleep without dreaming or that I
have ceased to exist; but at the very instant when I make this
supposition, I conceive myself, I imagine myself watching over my
slumber or surviving my annihilation, and I give up perceiving myself
from within only by taking refuge in the perception of myself from
without. That is to say that here again the full always succeeds the
full, and that an intelligence that was only intelligence, that had
neither regret nor desire, whose movement was governed by the movement
of its object, could not even conceive an absence or a void. The
conception of a void arises here when consciousness, lagging behind
itself, remains attached to the recollection of an old state when
another state is already present. It is only a comparison between what
is and what could or ought to be, between the full and the full. In a
word, whether it be a void of matter or a void of consciousness, _the
representation of the void is always a representation which is full and
which resolves itself on analysis into two positive elements: the idea,
distinct or confused, of a substitution, and the feeling, experienced or
imagined, of a desire or a regret_.

It follows from this double analysis that the idea of the absolute
nought, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a
self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word. If suppressing