I am without a certain perception, I am to call my idea compatible. On the ground of my sheer ignorance, in other words, I am to know that my idea is assimilated, and that, to a greater or less extent, it will survive in Reality. But such a position is irrational.
That which is unconditionally possible is viewed apart from, and is supposed to remain undetermined by, relation to the Real. There are no seen relations, and therefore none, and therefore no alien relations which can penetrate and dissolve our supposed idea. And we hold to this, even when the idea is applied to the Real. But a relation to the Real implies essentially a relation to what the Real possesses, and hence to have no relations of one’s own means to have them all from the outside. Bare possibility is therefore, against its will, one extreme of relatedness. For it is conjoined de facto with the Reality, as we have that in our minds; and, since the conjunction is external, the relatedness is given by outer necessity. But necessary relation of an element to that which is outside means, as we know, the disruption of this element internally. The merely possible, if it could exist, would be, therefore, for all we know, sheer error. For it would, so far as we know, be an idea, which, in no way and to no extent, is accepted by Reality. But possibility, in this sense, has contradicted itself. Without an actual basis in, and without a positive connection with, Reality, the possible is, in short, not possible at all.[1]
- ↑ It may be worth while to notice that Possibility, if you try to make it unconditional, is the same thing as one sense of Inconceivability or Impossibility. The Impossible really is that which contradicts positive knowledge (Chapter xxvii.). It is never that which you merely fail to connect with Reality. But, if you wrongly took it in this sense, and if you based it on mere privation, it would unawares have turned round into the unconditionally possible. For that is actually incompatible with the Reality, as de facto we have the Reality in our minds. Each of these ideas, in short, is viciously based on privation, and each is a different aspect of the same self-contradictory complex.
