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Order in Nature and Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Extract
In a cloud, the imagination can cut out patterns freely. The substance which fills them is real, but the objects which they outline do not exist. To exist, they would have to be distinguishable from the continuity within which they arose; they would have to constitute within it a particular and identifiable state endowed with an egregious privilege: duration. This duration can be brief or long, that of a cake of soap or of a spiral nebula; it is always of finite dimensions. This is what makes it the opposite of the instantaneousness of the mathematical beings which differential calculus arbitrarily cuts out within the continuity of movements.
Existence is a singularity that endures. But this duration, in the domain of the realities that are offered to our cognition, is never unlimited. In the universe of men there is nothing that escapes the slow or rapid, but always active, degradation which debases everything that has risen, which attenuates every kind of diversity in order to bring about a uniform distribution that physicists call the maximum state of entropy and housekeepers, as well as sociologists, call the maximum of disorder.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1955 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
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2. What is Life? (Cambridge, University Press, 1951), p. 74.
3. Pierre Auger, L'Homme microscopique (Paris, Flammarion), p. 27.
4. La Cybernétique, Structure et Evolution des Techniques (Paris, S.E.T.), p. 56.
5. Ibid.
6. La Cité antique (Paris, Hachette, 1870), pp. 143-145.
7. Titus Livy, iii. 5, 5.
8. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique, pp. 448, 452.
9. Maurice Hauriou, Dean of the Faculty of Law in Toulouse, died in 1929. In 1925 he published, in the fourth fascicule of La Nouvelle Journée, his study on "La Théorie de l'Institu tion et de Fondation." The text was reprinted in fascicule 23 of the same publication (Bloud et Gay, 1933). The present state of theories concerning "Institution" is expounded in a re markable article by Jean Brethe de la Gressays, in Vol. V of the Repertoire de Droit Civil of Dalloz.
10. Ecclesiasticus xv. 14. Quoted by Aquinas Summa Theologica I, qu. 22, art. 2, 4.
11. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique, p. 4.
12. Aux Sources du droit (Paris, Librairie Bloud et Gay), p. 105.
13. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique, p. 104.
14. Evolution créatrice (Geneva, Skira, 1945), p. 229.
15. Simone de Beauvoir, Tous les Hommes sont mortels (Paris, Gallimard, 1947), p. 283.
16. Revue scientifique, August-September 1944.
17. Pierre Auger, L'homme microscopique (Paris, Flammarion), pp. 43, 44.
18. Ibid.
19. Le Mystérieux Univers (Paris, Hermann), p. 144; Eng. ed. (New York, Macmillan, 1930).