Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/154

 merely the value of possibility, the circumstances are such as may or may not be, and so the necessity is relative, and is related thus to the circumstances which constitute the beginning, and which are accordingly immediate and contingent. This is external necessity, which has no higher value than that possessed by contingency. It is possible to demonstrate external necessity in such a way as to show that this or the other thing is necessary, but the circumstances always remain contingent; they can exist, but they can also not exist. A tile may fall from the roof and kill a man, but the falling down of the tile, the concurrence, may be or may not be; it is contingent. In this external necessity it is the result only which is necessary; the circumstances are contingent. These two, the conditioning causes and the results, are for this reason different. The one is determined as contingent, the other as necessary; this is the difference considered abstractly, but there is also a concrete difference. Something results quite different from what was posited; and since the forms are different, so too the content of the two sides is different. The tile falls accidentally; the person who is killed, the particular concrete subject, his death, and that act of falling down, are entirely heterogeneous, have a perfectly different content; something appears as result which is entirely different from what was posited. When life is considered according to the conditions of external necessity as a result of soil, heat, light, air, moisture, &c., as a product of these conditions, what is implied is that the matter is being looked at from the point of view of external necessity. This latter has to be carefully distinguished from the true inner necessity.

2. The inner necessity consists just in this, that everything of the nature of cause, occasion, occasioning circumstance, is presupposed and definitely distinguished, and the result belongs to One. The necessity puts together the two elements into one unity. All that takes place in this necessity takes place in such a way that