Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/470

Rh and unhappy, who are unrighteous but happy, and who are neither righteous nor happy. Now begin to make universal assertions about the relations amongst these classes. Assert that all the righteous are happy. At once, as we saw in our seventh lecture, this assertion appears as a negative existential assertion, and as the destruction of a possibility. For you can express it by saying that in your universe the sub-class, otherwise possible, of righteous men who are unhappy, has vanished from existence. Your universe has now reduced its realized possibilities to the existence of three sub-classes. The example is trivial. It is but one of a countless number. To know facts is to destroy mere possibilities. To know that there is even a single righteous man in your universe of discourse, is to destroy so far the abstractly possible alternative that that individual man is unrighteous. This result so far holds with absolute generality, and without regard to your special definition of the concept of Being. Accordingly every realist regards the real as the selection from the possible. And in this we too agree with him.

Spinoza, in his curious compromise between realistic and mystical motives, undertook indeed to deny this selective function of reality; and asserted that from the divine point of view all that is possible is real. In vain, however, would one attempt to carry out this doctrine, except by expressly substituting for all other conceptions of being the Third Conception, viz., that of the real as the valid. But even this conception itself is obliged to distinguish between the relatively determinate genuine possibilities of experience, and the absolutely unre-