Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

SCANNED PDF

Just as an experience is always an experience of--of —of something other than the experience itself-so itself—so a thought is always a thought about--about about—about something other than the thought itself. In this sense, a thought is always about reality, in that it is always about something real independently of the thought itself. 

A thought about reality in this sense may be true or false, depending on whether or not the something thought about is as it is thought to be. Also, a thought about reality may be not merely true but necessarily true, provided that the something thought about could not conceivably be otherwise than it is thought to be---the be—the proof of this being that the contradictory thought is also self-contradictory and therefore not merely false, but necessarily false.

...

The same conclusion follows from the principle--if principle—if you will, "the Aristotelian principle," or what Whitehead calls "the ontological principle"--that —that anything abstractly real, like the utterly abstract property of being something real, can never be real simply in itself, but is always real only in that it is somehow instantiated in something concretely real. Thus, even as anything concretely real somehow instantiates and hence requires the utterly abstract properties of being real and of being concretely real, so these utterly abstract properties must be somehow instantiated in, and hence in turn require, some concretely real thing, although anything concretely real will do, no particular concrete reality being necessary.

...

My contention is that the divine is to the nondivine as "all" is to "some." Insofar, then, as being something divinely real and being something nondivinely real are alike ways of being something not merely abstractly but concretely real, to be something divinely real is not only to be something that is real for all other things for which other things are real, i.e., for all concretely real things, but also to be something for which all other things are real, be they concretely or merely abstractly real. By contrast, to be something nondivinely real is to be something that is real for only some other things for which other things are real, i.e., for only some concretely real things, and also to be something for which only some other things are real, be they concretely or merely abstractly real themselves.

But why is it necessarily true that there is something divinely real as well as something nondivinely real? If the divinely real is to the nondivinely real as "all" is to "some," we may say just as truly that they are to one another as whole is to part. But, then, just as there can be no whole without part(s), so there can be no part(s) without whole. Thus there cannot be anything divinely real unless there is something nondivinely real; and, conversely, there cannot be anything nondivinely real unless there is something divinely real. This symmetry, however, is balanced by an asymmetry similar to that mentioned above (Ad 2). For while the nondivinely real and the divinely real necessarily require one another, the divinely real's requirement is satisfied simply by there being some nondivinely real thing(s), no particular nondivine thing(s) being required. On the contrary, there can be one, and only one thing, that satisfies the nondivinely real's requirement that there be something divinely real---namelyreal—namely, the one and only necessarily existent whole of reality, all of whose parts exist merely contingently even though it is not contingent but necessary that there be some such parts.

...