expressed both by extension in space and
detention in time. Both of these are but the distance between what is
and what ought to be. From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, space
and time can be nothing but the field that an incomplete reality, or
rather a reality that has gone astray from itself, needs in order to run
in quest of itself. Only it must be admitted that the field is created
as the hunting progresses, and that the hunting in some way deposits the
field beneath it. Move an imaginary pendulum, a mere mathematical point,
from its position of equilibrium: a perpetual oscillation is started,
along which points are placed next to points, and moments succeed
moments. The space and time which thus arise have no more "positivity"
than the movement itself. They represent the remoteness of the position
artificially given to the pendulum from its normal position, _what it
lacks_ in order to regain its natural stability. Bring it back to its
normal position: space, time and motion shrink to a mathematical point.
Just so, human reasonings are drawn out into an endless chain, but are
at once swallowed up in the truth seized by intuition, for their
extension in space and time is only the distance, so to speak, between
thought and truth.[101] So of extension and duration in relation to pure
Forms or Ideas. The sensible forms are before us, ever about to recover
their ideality, ever prevented by the matter they bear in them, that is
to say, by their inner void, by the interval between what they are and
what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point of recovering
themselves, for ever occupied in losing themselves. An inflexible law
condemns them, like the rock of Sisyphus, to fall back when they are
almost touching the summit, and this law, which has projected them into
space and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their
original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and decay, the
evolutions ever beginning over and over again, the infinite repetition
of the cycles of celestial spheres--this all represents merely a certain
fundamental deficit, in which materiality consists. Fill up this
deficit: at once you suppress space and time, that is to say, the
endlessly renewed oscillations around a stable equilibrium always aimed
at, never reached. Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in
space is contracted into pure Form. And past, present, and future shrink
into a single moment, which is