dicate its relations—relations necessarily in part external, and in part, therefore, variable—then your account of this thing will fall short and be empty. But, otherwise, you will be affirming of the thing that which only it may be.
And, once driven to enter on this course, you are hurried away beyond all landmarks. You are forced indefinitely to go on expanding the subject of your predicates, until at last it has disappeared into something quite different. And hence, in employing potential existence, we are, so to speak, on an inclined plane. We start by saying, “A is such that, under probable conditions, its nature will develope into B; and therefore, because of this, I venture already to call it B.” And we end by claiming that, because A may possibly be made to pass into another result C, C may, therefore, on this account, be predicated already. And we have to hold to this, although C, to but a very small extent, has been produced by A, and although, in the result, A itself may have totally vanished.
We must therefore admit that potential existence implies, to some extent, a compromise. Its use, in fact, cannot be defined upon a very strict principle. Still, by bearing in mind what the term endeavours to mean, and what it always must be taken more or less to involve, we may, in practice, succeed in employing it conveniently and safely. But it will remain, in the end, a wide-spread source of confusion and danger. The more a writer feels himself led naturally to have recourse to this phrase, the better cause he probably has for at least attempting to avoid it.
It may throw light on several problems, if we consider further the general nature of Possibility and Chance.[1] We touched on this subject above,
- ↑ On Possibility compare Chapter xxvii., and Principles of Logic, Book I., Chap. vii.
