m, they can have no independent existence. At most we
might say that each of these Ideas is an _ideal_. But it is in the
opposite hypothesis that we are placing ourselves. Ideas must then exist
by themselves. Ancient philosophy could not escape this conclusion.
Plato formulated it, and in vain did Aristotle strive to avoid it. Since
movement arises from the degradation of the immutable, there could be no
movement, consequently no sensible world, if there were not, somewhere,
immutability realized. So, having begun by refusing to Ideas an
independent existence, and finding himself nevertheless unable to
deprive them of it, Aristotle pressed them into each other, rolled them
up into a ball, and set above the physical world a Form that was thus
found to be the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his own
words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the God of Aristotle--necessarily
immutable and apart from what is happening in the world, since he is
only the synthesis of all concepts in a single concept. It is true that
no one of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in the
divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of Plato within the
God of Aristotle. But if only we imagine the God of Aristotle in a sort
of refraction of himself, or simply inclining toward the world, at once
the Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, as if they
were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays stream out from the
sun, which nevertheless did not contain them. It is probably this
_possibility of an outpouring_ of Platonic Ideas from the Aristotelian
God that is meant, in the philosophy of Aristotle, by the active
intellect, the [Greek: nous] that has been called [Greek:
poietikos]--that is, by what is essential and yet unconscious in human
intelligence. The [Greek: nous poietikos] is Science entire, posited all
at once, which the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to
reconstruct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then within us, or
rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as the Alexandrians said, a
vision always virtual, never actually realized by the conscious
intellect. In this intuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it
is that "does everything,"[102] playing in relation to the discursive
intellect, which moves in time, the same role as the motionless Mover
himself plays in relation to the movement of the heavens and the course
of things.

There is, then, immanent in