shaped itself. I think of something which I may perhaps best describe as
being off the stage or out of court, or as the Void without
Implications, or as Nothingness, or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of
hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of human thought, and thither I
think all negative terms reach at last, and merge and become nothing.
Whatever positive class you make, whatever boundary you draw, straight
away from that boundary begins the corresponding negative class and
passes into the illimitable horizon of nothingness. You talk of pink
things, you ignore, as the arbitrary postulates of Logic direct, the
more elusive shades of pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not-pink,
known and knowable, and still in the not-pink region one comes to the
Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the NOT classes meet
in that Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is
infinite space and infinite time and any being of infinite qualities;
and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy altogether. I
will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about any NOT things. I
will not deal with not things at all, except by accident and
inadvertence. If I use the word "infinite" I use it as one often uses
"countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"--or
"immeasurable"--"immeasurable cliffs"--that is to say as the limit of
measurement, as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard
as you can, and as many again, and so on and so on until you and your
numerical system are beaten to a standstill.

Now a great number of apparently positive terms are, or have become,
practically negative terms and are under the same ban with me. A
considerable number of terms that have played a great part in the world
of thought, seem to me to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no
content or an undefined content or an unjustifiable content. For
example, that word Omniscient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses