Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/82

72 the understanding; the necessary, for both. Indeed, the distinction between necessary, actual, and possible really exists only in the abstract and according to the conception; in the real world, on the other hand, all three fall into one. For all that happens, happens necessarily, because it happens from causes; but these themselves have again causes, so that the whole of the events of the world, great and small, are a strict concatenation of necessary occurrences. Accordingly everything actual is also necessary, and in the real world there is no difference between actuality and necessity, and in the same way no difference between actuality and possibility; for what has not happened, i.e., has not become actual, was also not possible, because the causes without which it could never appear have not themselves appeared, nor could appear, in the great concatenation of causes; thus it was an impossibility. Every event is therefore either necessary or impossible. All this holds good only of the empirically real world, i.e., the complex of individual things, thus of the whole particular as such. If, on the other hand, we consider things generally, comprehending them in abstracto, necessity, actuality, and possibility are again separated; we then know everything which is in accordance with the a priori laws which belong to our intellect as possible in general; that which corresponds to the empirical laws of nature as possible in this world, even if it has never become actual; thus we distinguish clearly the possible from the actual. The actual is in itself always also necessary, but is only comprehended as such by him who knows its cause; regarded apart from this, it is and is called contingent. This consideration also gives us the key to that contentio between the Megaric Diodorus and Chrysippus the Stoic which Cicero refers to in his book De Fato. Diodorus says: "Only what becomes actual was possible, and all that is actual is also necessary." Chrysippus on the other hand says: "Much that is possible never becomes actual; for only the necessary becomes