Again, the mind sees necessary relations between abstract essences compared with one another. Five and seven are necessarily twelve. Whatever begins to exist actually must have a cause. Contingent being, if such exists, is necessarily dependent for its existence on some other actually existing being. If potential being is actualized it must be actualized by actual being. The three interior angles of a triangle are necessarily equal to two right angles. And so on.
But is the abstract essence itself—apart from all mental analysis of it, apart from all comparison of it with its constituent factors or with other essences—in any sense necessary? There is no question of its actual existence, but only of itself as an object of thought. Now our thought does not seem to demand necessarily, or have a necessary connexion with, any particular object of which we do de facto think. What we do think of is determined by our experience of actual things. And the things which we conceive to be possible, by the exercise of our reason upon the data of our senses, memory and imagination, are determined as to their nature and number by our experience of actual things, even although they themselves can and do pass beyond the domain of actually experienced things. The only necessary object of thought is reality in general: for the exercise of the function of thought necessarily demands an object, and this object must be reality of some sort. Thought, as we saw, begins with actual [pg 082] reality. Working upon this, thought apprehends in it the foundations of those necessary relations and judgments already referred to. Considering, moreover, the actual data of experience, our thought can infer from these the actual existence of one Being Who must exist by a necessity of His Essence.
But, furthermore, must all the possible essences which the mind does or can actually think of, be conceived as necessarily possible in the same sense in which it is suggested that they must be conceived as eternally possible? To this question, too, we shall return presently.
(d) Finally, possible essences appear to the mind as immutable, and consequently indivisible. This means simply that the relations which we establish between them and their constitutive factors are not only necessary but immutable: that if any constitutive factor of an essence is conceived as removed from it, or any new factor as added, we have no longer the original essence but some other essence. If “animal” is a being essentially embodying the two objective concepts of “organism” and “sentient,” then on removing either we have no longer the essence “animal”. So, too, by adding to these some other element compatible with them, e.g. “rational,” we have no longer the essence “animal,” but the essence “man”. Hence possible essences have been likened to numbers, inasmuch as if we add anything to, or subtract anything from, any given number, we have now no longer the original number but another.[90] This, too, is only an expression of the laws of identity and contradiction.
We might ask, however, whether, apart from analysis and comparison of an abstract object of thought with its constitutive notes or factors, such a possible essence is in itself immutably possible. This is similar to the question whether we can or must conceive such a possible essence as eternally and necessarily possible.
15. Grounds of Those Characteristics.—In considering the grounds or reasons of the various characteristics just enumerated it may be well to reflect that when we speak of the intrinsic possibility of a possible essence we conceive the latter as something complex, which we mentally resolve into its constitutive notes or factors or principles, to see if these are compatible. If they are we pronounce the essence intrinsically possible, if not we pronounce it intrinsically impossible. For [pg 083] our minds, absence of internal incompatibility in the content of our concept of any object is the test of its intrinsic possibility. Whatever fulfils this test we consider capable of existing. But what about the possibility of the notes, or factors, or principles themselves, whereby we define those essences, and by the union of which we conceive those essences to be constituted? How do we know that those abstract principles or factors—no one of which can actually exist alone, since all are abstract—can in certain combinations form possible objects of thought? We can know this only because we have either experienced such objects as actual, or because we infer their possibility from objects actually experienced. And similarly our knowledge of what is impossible is based upon our experience of the actual. Since, moreover, our experience of the actual is finite and fallible, we may err in our judgments as to what essences are, and what are not, intrinsically possible.[91]
If now we ask ourselves what intelligible reason can we assign for the characteristics just indicated as belonging to possible essences, we must fix our attention first of all on the fundamental fact that the human intellect always apprehends its object in an abstract condition. It contemplates the essence apart from the existence in which the essence is subject to circumstances of time and place and change; it grasps the essence in a static condition as simply identical with itself and distinct from all else; it sees the essence as indifferent to existence at any place or time; reflecting then on the actualization of this essence in the existing order of things, it apprehends the essence as capable of indefinite actualizations (except in cases where it sees some reason to the contrary), i.e. it universalizes the essence; comparing it with its constituent notes or elements, and with those of other essences, it sees and affirms certain relations (of identity or diversity, compatibility or incompatibility, between those notes or elements) as holding good necessarily and immutably, and independently of the actual embodiment of those notes or elements in any object existing at any particular place or time. All these features of the relations between the constituents of abstract, possible essences, seem so far to be adequately accounted for by the fact [pg 084] that the intellect apprehends those essences in the abstract: the data in which it apprehends them being given to it through sense experience. What may be inferred from the fact that the human intellect has this power of abstract thought, is another question[92]. But granting that it does apprehend essences in this manner, we seem to have in this fact a sufficient explanation of the features just referred to.
We have, however, already suggested other questions about the reality of those possible essences. Is their possibility, so far as known to us, explained by our experience of actual things? Or must we think them as eternally, necessarily and immutably possible? From the manner in which we must apprehend them, can we infer anything about the reality of an Eternal, Immutable, Necessary Intelligence, in whose Thought and Essence alone those essences, as apprehended by our minds, can find their ultimate ground and explanation? These are the questions we must now endeavour to examine.
16. Possible Essences as such are Something Distinct from mere Logical Being, and from Nothingness.—There have been philosophers who have held that the actual alone is real, and only while it is actual; that a purely (intrinsically) possible essence as such is nothing real; that the actual alone is possible; that the purely possible as such is impossible. This view is based on the erroneous assumption that whatever is or becomes actual is so, or becomes so, by some sort of unintelligible fatalistic necessity. Apart from the fact that it is incompatible with certain truths of theism, such as the Divine Omnipotence and Freedom in creating, it also involves the denial of all real becoming or change, and the assertion that all [pg 085] actuality is eternal; for if anything becomes actual, it was previously either possible or impossible; if impossible, it could never become actual; if possible, then as possible it was something different from the impossible, or from absolute nothingness. Moreover, the intrinsically possible is capable of becoming actual, and may be actualized if there exists some actual being with power to actualize it; but absolute nothingness—or, in other words, the intrinsically impossible—cannot be actualized, even by Omnipotence; therefore the possible essence as such is something positive or real, as distinct from nothingness. Finally, intrinsically possible essences can be clearly distinguished from one another by the mind; but their negation which is pure non-entity or nothingness cannot be so distinguished. It is therefore clear that possible essences are in some true sense something positive or real. From which it follows that nothingness, in the strict sense, is not the mere absence or negation of actuality, but also the absence or negation of that positive or real something which is intrinsic possibility; in other words that nothingness in the strict sense means intrinsic impossibility.
Even those who hold the opinion just rejected—that the purely possible essence as such has no reality in any conceivable sense—would presumably admit that it is an object of human thought at all events; they would accord to it the being it has from the human mind which thinks it. It would therefore be an ens rationis according to this view, having only the ideal being which consists in its being constituted and contemplated by the human mind. That it has the ideal being, the esse ideale or esse intentionale, which consists in its being contemplated by the human mind as an object of thought, no one will deny. But a little reflection will show, firstly, that this ideal being is something more than the ideal being of an ens rationis, of a mere logical entity; and, secondly, that a possible essence must have some other ideal being than that which it has in the individual human mind.