Such, indeed, was the sentence passed by the philosophers of the Eleatic school. And they passed it without any reservation whatever. As becoming shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the molds of language, they declared it unreal. In spatial movement and in change in general they saw only pure illusion. This conclusion could be softened down without changing the premisses, by saying that the reality changes, but that it _ought not_ to change. Experience confronts us with becoming: that is _sensible_ reality. But the _intelligible_ reality, that which _ought_ to be, is more real still, and that reality does not change. Beneath the qualitative becoming, beneath the evolutionary becoming, beneath the extensive becoming, the mind must seek that which defies change, the definable quality, the form or essence, the end. Such was the fundamental principle of the philosophy which developed throughout the classic age, the philosophy of Forms, or, to use a term more akin to the Greek, the philosophy of Ideas. The word [Greek: eidos], which we translate here by "Idea," has, in fact, this threefold meaning. It denotes (1) the quality, (2) the form or essence, (3) the end or _design_ (in the sense of _intention_) of the act being performed, that is to say, at bottom, the _design_ (in the sense of _drawing_) of the act supposed accomplished. _These three aspects are those of the adjective, substantive and verb, and correspond to the three essential categories of language._ After the explanations we have given above, we might, and perhaps we ought to, translate [Greek: eidos] by "view" or rather by "moment." For [Greek: eidos] is the stable view taken of the instability of things: the _quality_, which is a moment of becoming; the _form_, which is a moment of evolution; the _essence_, which is the mean form above and below which the other forms are arranged as alterations of the mean; finally, the intention or _mental design_ which presides over the action being accomplished, and which is nothing else, we said, than the _material design_, traced out and contemplated beforehand, of the action accomplished. To reduce things to Ideas is therefore to resolve becoming into its principal moments, each of these being, moreover, by the hypothesis, screened from the laws of time and, as it were, plucked out of eternity. That is to say that we end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the real.