The Necessary, the Impossible, the Possible, and the Contingent

[What is here to be understood by affections.] Now that the nature of being, insofur as it is being, has been explained, we pass on to the explanation of some of its affections. It should be noted that by affections we here understand what elsewhere, in Art. 52 Part I Prine. Philosoph., Descartes has termed attributes. For being, insofar as it is being, does not affect us through itself alone, as substance, and has therefore to be explained through some attribute, from which, however, it is distinguished only by reason. Hence I cannot suffiCiently wonder at the subtlety of mind of those who have sought, not without great harm to truth, something that is between being and nothing. But I shall waste no time in refuting their error, because they themselves, in struggling to provide definitions of such affections, disappear from sight in their own vain subtlety. [Definition of affections. ] We shall therefore continue on our way, and we say Appendix Containing Metaphysical Thoughts, Part I, Chapter 3 183 that the affections of being are certain attributes under which we understand the essence or existence of each individual thing, although these attributes are distinguished from the thing only by reason. I shall here attempt to explain some of these affections (for I do not undertake to deal with them all) and to set them apart from those designations that are not affections of any being. And in the first place I shall deal with the Necessary and the Impossible. [In how many ways a thing is said to be necessary or impossible. ] There are two ways in which a thing is said to be necessary or impossible, either with respect to its essence or with respect to its cause. With respect to essence we know that God necessarily exists, for his essence cannot be conceived without existence; whereas, with respect to the contradiction involved in its essence, a chimera is incapable of existence. With respect to cause, things (e.g., material things) are said to be either impossible or necessary. For if we have regard only to their essence, we can conceive that clearly and distinctly without existence; therefore they can never exist through the force and necessity of their essence, but only through the force of their cause, God, the creator of all things. So if it is in the divine decree that a thing should exist, it will necessarily exist; if not, it will be impossible for it to exist. For it is self-evident that if a thing has no cause for existence-either an internal or an external cause- it is impossible for it to exist. Now in this second hypothesis a thing is supposed to be such that it cannot exist either by force of its own essence-which I understand to be an internal cause-or by force of the divine decree, the unique external cause of all things. Hence it follows that it is impossible for things, as we suppose them to be in the second hypothesis, to exist. [A Chimera is properly called a verbal being.] Here it should be noted that: I. Because a chimera is neither in the intellect nor in the imagination, we may properly call it a verbal being, for it can be expressed only in words. For example, we can express a square circle in words, but we cannot in any way imagine it, far less understand it. Therefore a chimera is nothing but a word; and so impossibility cannot be counted among the affections of being, for it is mere negation. [Created things depend on God for their essence and existence. ] 2. Not only the existence of created things but also, as we shall later on demonstrate with the greatest certainty in Part 2, their essence and their nature depend solely on God’s decree. Hence it clearly follows that created things have no necessity of themselves; for they have no essence of themselves, nor do they exist of themselves. [The necessity that is in created things from their cause is either of essence or of existence; but these two are not distinguished in God. ] 3. Finally, the necessity such as is in created things by virtue of their cause is so called either with respect to their essence or with respect to their existence; for these two are distinct in created things, the former depending on the eternal laws of nature, the latter on the series and order of causes. But in God, whose essence is not distinguished from his existence, the necessity of essence is likewise not distinguished from the necessity of existence. Hence it follows that if we were to conceive the entire order of nature, we should find that many things whose nature we clearly and distinctly perceive- that is, whose essence is necessarily such as it is-could in no way exist. For we should find that the existence of such things in nature is just as much 184 Principles of Cartesian Philosophy impossible as we now see it to be impossible that a huge elephant should pass through the eye of a needle, although we clearly perceive the nature of both. Hence the existence of those things would be only a chimera, which we could neither imagine nor understand. [The Possible and the Contingent are not affections of things. ] So much for necessity and impossibility, to which I have thought it advisable to add a few remarks concerning the possible and the contingent. For these two are regarded by some as affections of things, whereas they are in fact nothing but a failure of our intellect, as I shall clearly show when I explain what is to be understood by these two terms. [What is the Possible, and what the Contingent. ] A thing is said to be possible when we understand its efficient cause but do not know whether the cause is determined. Hence we can also consider it as possible, but not as either necessary or impossible. But if we attend simply to the essence of the thing and not to its cause, we shall call the thing contingent, that is, we shall consider it as midway between God and a chimera, so to speak, because on the side of essence we find in it no necessity to exist1 as in the case of the divine essence, nor again any inconsistency or impossibility, as in the case of a chimera. Now if anyone wishes to call contingent what I call possible, or possible what I call contingent, I shall not oppose him, for it is not my custom to argue about words. It will be enough ifhe grants us that these two are only the defect of our perception, and not anything real. [The Possible and the Contingent are only the defect of our intellect. ] If anyone wishes to deny this, his error can be demonstrated to him with no trouble. For if he attends to nature and the way it depends on God, he will find nothing contingent in things, that is, nothing that can either exist or not exist on the part of the thing, or is a real contingency, as it is commonly called. This is readily apparent from our teaching in Axiom 10 Part I, to wit, that the same force is required in creating a thing as in preserving it. So no created thing affects anything by its own force, just as no created thing began to exist by its own force. From this it follows that nothing happens except by the power of the all-creating cause-that is, God-who by his concurrence at every moment continues to create all things. Now because nothing happens except by the divine power alone, it is easy to see that those things that happen do so by the force of God’s decree and will. But because there is in God no inconstancy or variability (by Prop. 18 and Cor. Prop. 20 Part I ), he must have resolved from eternity to produce those things that he is now producing. And because nothing has a more necessary existence than that which God has decreed should exist, it follows that the necessity to exist has been from eternity in all created things. Nor can we say that those things are contingent because God could have decreed otherwise. For because in eternity there is no when or before or after or any affection of time, it follows that God never existed prior to those decrees so as to be able to decree otherwise. 3 3 [In order that tius proof may be well understood, attention should be given to what IS mdicated In the second part of the AppendiX concerning the Will of God, to wit, that God’s will or constant Appendix Containing Metaphysical Thoughts, Part I, Chapter 4 185 [To reconcile the freedom of our will with God’s predestination surpasses human understanding. ] As to the freedom of the human will, which we asserted to be free in Schol. Prop. 15 Part I, this too is preserved by the concurrence of God, nor does any man will or perform anything except what God has decreed from eternity that he should will or perform. How this can be while saving human freedom is beyond our capacity to understand. Yet we must not reject what we clearly perceive because of what we do not know, for if we attend to our nature, we clearly and distinctly understand that we are free in our actions, and that we reach decisions on many th ings simply on account of our will to do so. Again, if we attend to the nature of God, as we have just shown, we clearly and distinctly perceive that all things depend on him, and that nothing exists except that whose existence God has decreed from eternity. But how the human will continues to be created by God at every moment in such a way as to remain free, we do not know. For there are many things that exceed our grasp and that nevertheless we know to have been brought about by God-for example, the real division of matter into indefinite particles, clearly demonstrated by us in Prop. 11 Part 2, although we do not know how that division comes about. Note that we here take for granted that those two notions, the possible and the contingent, signify merely the defectiveness of our knowledge regarding the existence of a thing.