eternity.

This amounts to saying that physics is but logic spoiled. In this
proposition the whole philosophy of Ideas is summarized. And in it also
is the hidden principle of the philosophy that is innate in our
understanding. If immutability is more than becoming, form is more than
change, and it is by a veritable fall that the logical system of Ideas,
rationally subordinated and coordinated among themselves, is scattered
into a physical series of objects and events accidentally placed one
after another. The generative idea of a poem is developed in thousands
of imaginations which are materialized in phrases that spread themselves
out in words. And the more we descend from the motionless idea, wound on
itself, to the words that unwind it, the more room is left for
contingency and choice. Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might
have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All
these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves,
to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears
the words: it therefore perceives only accidents. But our mind, by
successive bounds, leaps from the words to the images, from the images
to the original idea, and so gets back, from the perception of
words--accidents called up by accidents--to the conception of the Idea
that posits its own being. So the philosopher proceeds, confronted with
the universe. Experience makes to pass before his eyes phenomena which
run, they also, one behind another in an accidental order determined by
circumstances of time and place. This physical order--a degeneration of
the logical order--is nothing else but the fall of the logical into
space and time. But the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to
the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive reality
that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the
materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable
system of Ideas. Thus Science is obtained, which appears to us, complete
and ready-made, as soon as we put back our intellect into its true
place, correcting the deviation that separated it from the intelligible.
Science is not, then, a human construction. It is prior to our
intellect, independent of it, veritably the generator of Things.

And indeed, if we hold the Forms to be simply snapshots taken by the
mind of the continuity of becoming, they must be relative to the mind
that thinks the