Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/297

278 such as admit of alternative answers. “A,” he declares, “in case it exists at all, is either B or C.” Further research shows universally, perhaps, that No A is B. Hereupon the abstract possibilities are in so far reduced, and the world of Being, taken still as a realm of external meanings, is limited to a realm where “If A exists at all, it can only be C.” The purpose of our universal judgments is thus that, by the aid of disjunctive judgments, they enable us to determine the world of Being by cutting off some apparent possibilities as really impossible, and by then taking the remaining alternatives, not in general, as any entirely determinate account of what is, but as a less indeterminate account of Reality than is the one with which we started. To think in universal terms is thus to attempt, as it were, to exhaust the abstractly possible alternatives, and to define what exists in yonder external world as what survives the various stages of ideal destruction through which one passes as one judges. So long as thus, separating ideas from their external meanings, you struggle through universal judgments towards the far-off truth, your principle is the one that Spinoza stated, Omnis Determinatio est Negatio. The universal truth is the slayer of what seemingly might have been, but also of what, as a fact, proves to be not possible.

As for your disjunctive judgments themselves, even they, too, affirm about external Being only by first denying. “A is either B or C; there is no third possibility open,” — such must be one’s assertion when a disjunction is announced. The type of an ideally perfect and evident disjunction is the assertion, “A is either B or not-B,” where B and not-B are the alternative members of a