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.

In 1929, Sir Halford Macknider gave a talk before the International Congress of Geography at Cambridge. He upheld the supremacy of water over all the elements that one must consider in the study of a region and its land. “The hydrosphere,” Sir Halford said, “should be considered as the central theme in geography.” There is nothing more important in the study of man than his relations with water—with sea water, river water, the condensed water in clouds, with rain or thaw, with subterranean water, the water that flows through plant sap or circulates in the arteries and veins of animals; even with the water content of blood, man's very life. Thus he expressed an almost mystical attitude toward water.

In our country, Arthur Orlando, one of the most energetic publicists of his generation, underlined the importance of water-the water one absorbs and which has such a great influence on man's life, as well as the river and ocean waters, which play such an important role in civilizations. It is true that water appears to be the dominant factor in the life of the land, in its physical as well as its cultural existence. This does not mean, however, that we must think of it mystically, as Sir Halford does.

The term proletariat became ambiguous when it no longer denoted industrial workers alone.

In the writings of Marx himself, one can trace the origin of a distinction between the working class and the proletariat, between factory workers as such and the total dehumanization which the term proletariat suggests. This distinction remains a virtual one for Marx and Marxists, because neither the prophet nor his disciples questioned, officially, the coincidence of these two definitions: it is the industrial workers who possess, par excellence, the proletarian characteristics of exclusion from the community and of disintegration of all special traits. And so one does not feel the need to separate the concrete group to which the term applies from the social condition or the state of mind that it evokes.

When Dante climbed on the devil's flank from the hell-center of earth he was puzzled and disturbed. He could not understand, since he had never changed direction, how he was going up now where he went down before. We have lived through a similar experience. In the old world of rational absolutes one could move indefinitely in the right direction. That was the nature of progress. But in our interwoven and tensile fields we escape one vortex only by slipping into another, and the right when followed leads always more or less to the wrong. It is like running a beast around a tree—there is the critical moment at which the pursuer becomes the pursued.

Philosophical symbolism is first of all a concrete interpretation of abstract truths. It permits one to become aware of the complex realities of intellectual and moral life by borrowing the cloak of symbols and myths whose external meaning disguises their esoteric significance. Plato's use of the myth is a characteristic example. The Platonic myth is, in reality, merely the concealment of a thought which, according to the philosopher, seemed too daring and too advanced for its period. If one wishes to explain the ideas that affect the suprasensible world, one cannot avoid using concrete symbols or alluding to them by the use of figurative meanings. Concrete symbols and myths make it possible to examine doctrines in allegorical form, wherein the imagination is given full rein, combining its freest fantasies with underlying truths. Symbolic thought proceeds in this way, by imagery and analogy, in contrast to logical thought.