Abstract

2. But even to the common understanding it soon becomes evident that such knowledge, pursued even to its ultimate perfection, is nevertheless inadequate to many of the modest demands which confront that understanding. For immediately upon the achievement of even slight knowledge of the essence, existence or causes of any finite thing there comes an awareness that this thing could have been other than as it is, could have been produced by other or different causes, could have failed to come into existence at all--is, in other words, radically contingent. Nor does this awareness seem merely a function of the partiality, the incompleteness and finitude of human experience; if it were, we could expect it to diminish directly in proportion to the increasing scope and depth of our experience; this it does not do, but rather grows and increases as experience grows, reaching at last such a state that many, under the spell of its conviction, are led to assert either that such an awareness is a necessary part or aspect of all experience or that its object must be a necessary, analytically discoverable part or aspect of all the objects of experience. No such assertions are necessary here; it suffices to re-affirm our faith in, and faithfulness to, the data of experience; one of the most pervasive and fundamental of all such data, then, we may honestly declare to be the radical contingency of the finite objects of our awareness. The most pervasive is existence.