ever come to an end. If
movement exists, or, in other words, if the small change is being
counted, the gold piece is to be found somewhere. And if the counting
goes on for ever, having never begun, the single term that is eminently
equivalent to it must be eternal. A perpetuity of mobility is possible
only if it is backed by an eternity of immutability, which it unwinds in
a chain without beginning or end.

Such is the last word of the Greek philosophy. We have not attempted to
reconstruct it _a priori_. It has manifold origins. It is connected by
many invisible threads to the soul of ancient Greece. Vain, therefore,
the effort to deduce it from a simple principle.[105] But if everything
that has come from poetry, religion, social life and a still rudimentary
physics and biology be removed from it, if we take away all the light
material that may have been used in the construction of the stately
building, a solid framework remains, and this framework marks out the
main lines of a metaphysic which is, we believe, the natural metaphysic
of the human intellect. We come to a philosophy of this kind, indeed,
whenever we follow to the end, the cinematographical tendency of
perception and thought. Our perception and thought begin by substituting
for the continuity of evolutionary change a series of unchangeable forms
which are turn by turn, "caught on the wing," like the rings at a
merry-go-round, which the children unhook with their little stick as
they are passing. Now, how can the forms be passing, and on what "stick"
are they strung? As the stable forms have been obtained by extracting
from change everything that is definite, there is nothing left, to
characterize the instability on which the forms are laid, but a negative
attribute, which must be indetermination itself. Such is the first
proceeding of our thought: it dissociates each change into two
elements--the one stable, definable for each particular case, to wit,
the Form; the other indefinable and always the same, Change in general.
And such, also, is the essential operation of language. Forms are all
that it is capable of expressing. It is reduced to taking as understood
or is limited to _suggesting_ a mobility which, just because it is
always unexpressed, is thought to remain in all cases the same.--Then
comes in a philosophy that holds the dissociation thus effected by
thought and language to be legitimate. What can it do, except objectify
the distinction with mor