Page:Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922.djvu/185

Rh assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

This process, however, has no logical foundation but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen.

That the sun will rise to-morrow, is an hypothesis; and that means that we do not know whether it will rise.

A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity.

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.

And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.

The world is independent of my will.

Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.

As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility.

For two colours, e.g. to be at one place in the visual field, is impossible, logically impossible, for it is excluded by the logical structure of colour. Rh