1510. All thought takes place . . .

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All thought takes place in and as a part of a real experience; and this experience, by its very nature, is always, even in dreams, an experience of—of a reality distinct from the experience itself. Consequently, all thought, like all experience, is of or about reality. Any thought, like any experience, is necessarily connected with, and in some way refers to, reality. Do away with all such connection and reference, and there is no reason to suppose that there is any coherent thought at all. Thought never thinks just itself, any more than language is ever merely about itself. 

But if all coherent thought, like all experience, is a relation, which, as such, necessarily requires a term in reality itself, all thought is either incoherent or else about something at least possible; and since what is properly meant by "the necessary" is the least common denominator of all possibilities, all thought is also about something necessary. Even ideas about merely possible things make sense only because there is an already existing reality able to produce or not to produce such things. Nor can this already existing reality itself be coherently thought to be merely possible, rather than strictly necessary. For to think of it as really possible and yet not necessarily existent would be to think of some still more ultimate reality able to produce or not to produce it, and so on ad infinitum. 

In sum: to think at all is to think about both the contingent and the necessary, the concrete products of concrescence and the process of concrescence itself as able to produce or not to produce them. Thus, if a putatively meaningful concept explicitly refers neither to a producible concrete reality nor to the ultimate productive reality in one or another of its inherent aspects, then the concept explicitly refers to nothing and, by the rule relating all coherent concepts to reality, must be void of coherent meaning. If, on the other hand, the concept refers to something producible, it may or may not refer to something actual, since the thing in question may or may not have been produced. In either case, however, it cannot fail to refer, at least implicitly, to the strictly ultimate reality that is able either to produce or not to produce the thing in question. 

25 November 1993