Possibility

“ From these remarks we conclude that the idea of possibility adds something to that of being, that is, non-repugnance, non-exclusion; and if there be question of pure possibility, the non-existence of the possible being is likewise added. ”

“ But, on the other hand, when you will, you turn possibility into actuality by dwelling upon one or another various already known and abstractly conceivable possibilities. The essence of the will is here not inventiveness, but attention. Choice is explicitly an attentive selection of one conceived possibility as that upon which you dwell, as against opposing possibilities. Even Desire, in its least rational forms, involves this element of attentive favouring of one conscious content as against a more or less dimly recognised background of other contents. ”

“ Viewed as an identity in general, Actuality is first of all Possibility—the reflection-into-self which, as in contrast with the concrete unity of the actual, is taken and made an abstract and unessential essentiality. Possibility is what is essential to reality, but in such a way that it is at the same time only a possibility. ”

“ What is wanted, as a rule, is some new effort of logical imagination, some glimpse of a possibility never conceived before, and then the direct perception that this possibility is realised in the case in question. ”

“ You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities—God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.” ”

“ These two potential conditions of a being—in the active causes which produce it, and in the pre-existing actual thing or things from which it is produced—are called each a real or subjective potency, potentia realis, or potentia subjectiva, in distinction from the mere logical or objective possibility of such a being. ”

“ The conjunctions of experience befall more or less invariably, variably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender a fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giving affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, and negative judgments, and judgments of actuality and possibility about certain things. ”

“ Possibility, along with the other modalities of necessity and impossibility and contingency, raises problems upon which I do not mean to imply that we should turn our backs. But we can at least limit modalities to whole statements. ”

“ From contingent actuality, as known to it, the mind can argue to the eternal actuality of Necessary Being, and to the impossibility either of a state of absolute nothingness, or of an order of purely possible things apart from all actuality. ”

“ And, as we have already seen, and in the present lecture shall further illustrate, the relation of partial and total meaning is, at the same time, the relation of any finite will to the expression of the complete intent of that same will. Without contradiction, therefore, you are unable to assert the real Being of any world, unless you conceive that world as the expressed will whose partial momentary embodiment you even now observe, whenever you get any rational idea before your mind. ”

“ What hypothesis, if any, do you oppose to our own thesis as to this complete and individual, this teleological constitution of the realm of Being, which we have asserted as our Fourth Conception. What is it that you doubt? And what alternative would be true if your doubt were well founded? Hesitate not to give your doubt all possible precision. Philosophy lives upon the comprehension of the meaning of its own doubts. ”

“ How in the concrete it takes place, in what special ways our consciousness is at once transcended, and included in a wider experience, it is the purpose of our whole present series of discussions to make clearer; and not until the end of the undertaking can one judge the degree of our success.
We proceed next to the characterization of certain more special principles that consciously determine us, at any moment, to acknowledge as real one rather than another fact or system of concrete facts, such as the existence of our fellows, or of Nature, or our own past lives. ”

“ In the same way, in the next division of my speculations, the essential subject and proper aim will be to carry that feeling, call it as we will, whether of pure love, or inner life, or higher truth, whose existence we have, we think, clearly established, through the crisis of doubt, to a determinate judgment of profound certainty and unwavering conviction, or at least to a rigorous distinction between that which is certain and that which must forever remain uncertain. ”

“ Now this disposition of our finite will, this tendency to a selection of our objects as unique, is precisely the character which our Fourth Conception regards as also belonging to that Absolute Will which faces the final meaning and fulfilment of the world. For the world as a whole is, from our point of view, an individual fact, not merely by virtue of the completeness of the contents of the Absolute Experience, but by reason of the definiteness of the selection of that object which shall be permitted to fulfil the final meaning. ”

“ If we regard the fulfilment of our purpose as contingent upon any circumstances, past, present, or future, we are not making use of first cause; we have descended to the level of secondary causation, which is the region of doubts, fears, and limitations, all of which we are impressing upon the universal subjective mind with the inevitable result that it will build up corresponding external conditions. ”

“ All reality of the first kind—however much it may proceed in its course without your knowledge and co-operation, or may exist in itself, i.e. unrelated to any possible consciousness, a point which we shall not discuss here—all such reality is at least for you, and as an event of your life, only in so far as you at some time direct your attention to it, throw yourself into it, and take hold of that reality with your consciousness. ”

“ The disposition of the human mind to generalize from experience—a propensity considered by these philosophers as an instinct of our nature—they usually describe under some such name as "our intuitive conviction that the future will resemble the past." ”

“ But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. ”

“ Reason (or, as some prefer to call it in this limited sense, Understanding) is the power by which we compare, and, from our comparisons, draw inferences or conclusions. By means of it we compare the suggestions of the Imagination with the suggestions of Experience, and accept or reject the former in accordance with the result of our comparison.
xii. Hope
Hope is desire, of which we imagine the fulfilment, while recognizing the presence of doubt. ”

“ The question we really have to ask is: 'When two things have been found to be often associated, and no instance is known of the one occurring without the other, does the occurrence of one of the two, in a fresh instance, give any good ground for expecting the other?' On our answer to this question must depend the validity of the whole of our expectations as to the future, the whole of the results obtained by induction, and in fact practically all the beliefs upon which our daily life is based. ”

“ We are to assert that just what the internal meaning already imperfectly but consciously is, namely, purpose relatively fulfilled, just that, and nothing else, the apparently external meaning when truly comprehended also proves to be, namely, the entire expression of the very Will that is fragmentarily embodied in the life of the flying conscious idea, — the fulfilment of the very aim that is hinted in the instant. ”

“ On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. ”

“ The causation whereby I explain the data of experience is itself a transcendent sort of causation, that, as a relation existent outside of experience, links us to the transcendent objects which cause experience in us.” Hereupon, however, one asks, at the present stage: What, then, leads you to believe in the existence of that transcendent sort of causation? The realist hereupon may reply: “Why, some of the data of consciousness are such as demand, as their sufficient cause, the existence of just such transcendent causality. ”

“ And why, some day, walking in the street with our attention miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for—suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover?
The truth must be admitted that thought works under strange conditions. Pure 'reason' is only one out of a{255} thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. ”

“ Of course, the consciousness is; but, however subjective, the consciousness must have more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seeming or wanting or willing, being in some way genuinely objective or grounded in reality. In a word, all consciousness implies and demands, postulates and possesses, a real world ”

“ For then we learn that our present will demands for its full expression, not merely contents or facts that are yet to be discriminated, but other wills than this present conscious will of ours, other purposes than we as yet observe within the limits of this instant’s consciousness. ”

“ Our actual life can do nothing more than become conscious of this world, piece by piece, as inexplicable chance may have connected these pieces, and to' comprehend, analyze and form a judgment of these pieces. ”

“ Meanwhile, there remain many ways in which we can define Being either more in terms of Immediacy or else more in terms of Ideas. But Fact and Idea, Immediacy and Thought, these are the factors whose contrast and whose conflict must determine what notion we can form of what it is to be. Some conceived union of elements furnished by these two factors that enter into our finite conflict constitutes, for any theory, the notion of reality. ”

“ My sympathies being equally divided and the two forces being equal it is perfectly obvious that nothing but mere chance influenced my decision in the end. It is a mighty force that of mere chance; absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being. ”

“ To any person who is familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, and is competent to estimate their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should depend upon any but the natural sequence of cause and effect. ”

“ WE see in the world around us a constant succession of causes and effects connected with each other. The laws of this connexion we learn in a great measure from experience, by observation of the occurrences which present themselves to our notice, succeeding one another. But in doing this, and in attending to this succession of appearances, of which we are aware by means of our senses, we supply from our own minds the Idea of Cause. ”

“ II. The idea of cause—at first strictly individual—soon commences its movement of extension.
1. During the first period, this extension is the work of the imagination, rather than of generalisation properly so called. By an instinctive tendency, well-known, though not explained, man concludes for intentions, a will, and a causality analogous to his own, in the medium that acts and reacts around him: his fellows, all living things, and whatever else by their movements simulate life (clouds, rivers, etc.) ”

“ In other words, either universe after the fact and once there would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as rational as the other. There would be absolutely no criterion by which we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance. ”

“ When we turn from ordinary circumstances to extraordinary ones we obtain sufficiently clear indications of the fact that the consciousness of objective existence is accompanied by an unconsciousness of subjective existence. ”

“ Evidently all rational beings have will as well as understanding; God wills, the Angels will, man wills. Indeed, how could knowledge progress but for the will to know? Yet of the two, considered in themselves, understanding is higher than will—
“for its object is the ratio, the very essential nature, of the desired good, while the object of will is the desired good whose ratio is in the understanding.... ”

“ Whoever denies this conception covertly, so we affirm, asserts it whenever, expressly or by implication, he talks of Being at all. For to talk of Being is to speak of fact that is either present to a consciousness or else is nothing. And from that one aspect of our definition which is involved in the thesis that whatever is, is consciously known, all the foregoing view of the unity of Being inevitably follows. ”

“ We may conclude with logic as sound and certain as is used in any scientific deduction, that every sense, faculty, and hope of the human soul has an objective reality in relation to which it is developed as surely as the wing argues an atmosphere, or the eye an ether. ”

“ All which seems to show that here is an element in existence, perhaps the initial element, which we do not know how to conquer, either because it cannot be conquered or because we have not looked at it with a strong and impartial gaze so as to recognise it calmly and fairly and know what it is. We must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution, whatever that solution may be. ”

“ When we have certain things given, then certain other things are given too; or we know that certain other occurrences will or may take place. There is hence nothing but events, appearances which happen, and the ways which these appearances have of happening. And how, in the name of science, can any one want any more? ”