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 on this, because many people do make this unqualified assertion, without seeing how violently it contradicts what they themselves, and all of us, believe, and rightly believe, at other times. If, indeed, they insert a qualification—if they merely say, “In one sense of the word ‘could’ nothing ever could have happened, except what did happen,” then, they may perhaps be perfectly right: we are not disputing that they may. All that we are maintaining is that, in one perfectly proper and legitimate sense of the word “could,” and that one of the very commonest senses in which it is used, it is quite certain that some things which didn’t happen could have happened. And the proof that this is so, is simply as follows.

It is impossible to exaggerate the frequency of the occasions on which we all of us make a distinction between two things, neither of which did happen,—a distinction which we express by saying, that whereas the one could have happened, the other could not. No distinction is commoner than this. And no one, I think, who fairly examines the instances in which we make it, can doubt about three