same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
eternal necessity.

The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
possible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and
consisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment
of feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact
occurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred
remains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or
for consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the
realm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in
tracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm
of essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies
there eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his
human nature and circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in
so exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition
and of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four
if I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to
do so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not
to combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I
happen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,
and the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in
contrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to
my idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be
congenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have