troke of the theoretical absurdities that the question of
movement raises. All is obscure, all is contradictory when we try, with
states, to build up a transition. The obscurity is cleared up, the
contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves along the
transition, in order to distinguish states in it by making cross cuts
therein in thought. The reason is that there is _more_ in the transition
than the series of states, that is to say, the possible cuts--_more_ in
the movement than the series of positions, that is to say, the possible
stops. Only, the first way of looking at things is conformable to the
processes of the human mind; the second requires, on the contrary, that
we reverse the bent of our intellectual habits. No wonder, then, if
philosophy at first recoiled before such an effort. The Greeks trusted
to nature, trusted the natural propensity of the mind, trusted language
above all, in so far as it naturally externalizes thought. Rather than
lay blame on the attitude of thought and language toward the course of
things, they preferred to pronounce the course of things itself to be
wrong.

Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philosophers of the Eleatic
school. And they passed it without any reservation whatever. As becoming
shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language,
they declared it unreal. In spatial movement and in change in general
they saw only pure illusion. This conclusion could be softened down
without changing the premisses, by saying that the reality changes, but
that it _ought not_ to change. Experience confronts us with becoming:
that is _sensible_ reality. But the _intelligible_ reality, that which
_ought_ to be, is more real still, and that reality does not change.
Beneath the qualitative becoming, beneath the evolutionary becoming,
beneath the extensive becoming, the mind must seek that which defies
change, the definable quality, the form or essence, the end. Such was
the fundamental principle of the philosophy which developed throughout
the classic age, the philosophy of Forms, or, to use a term more akin to
the Greek, the philosophy of Ideas.

The word [Greek: eidos], which we translate here by "Idea," has, in
fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (1) the quality, (2) the form
or essence, (3) the end or _design_ (in the sense of _intention_) of the
act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the _design_ (in the
sense of _drawing_) of the act supp