Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
I have already indicated, moreover, that I am not objecting to the use of such expressions
as “There is a man who is only an object of thought”, “There is redness”, “There is the
non-red”, “There is a possibility”, “There is an impossibility”, despite the fact that these
expressions do not refer to a being in the strict or proper sense of the term. If we like, we
may even speak about the thought or idea of a non-being, or of the eternal subsistence of a
non-being, or of the being of infinitely many possibilities and impossibilities, privided we
explicate these expressions by reducing them to sentences in which “being” is used in its
strict sense. At least we should not suppose that we could dispense with such reductions;
for even in the case of “There is the non-being of something”, the expression “there is” is
not used in its strict or proper sense.
Among the remarkable aporiae of Theophrastus on metaphysics which I have been
reading these days, I even found this: he speaks of those who believe that the Universe
contains many things which are not, never were, and never will be. But this seems to him to
go too far and he refuses to take up the question. Indeed Theophrastus says of God that he is
all-powerful and thinks not only of the best possible world but also of the totality of lesser
worlds which are not, were not, and never will be. These worlds could be said to belong to
the universe and to be essential to an understanding of its ultimate ground. You and Marty
do not go this far. But you do urge that the universe includes what is merely subsistent, and
indeed eternally subsistent; there would be all the eternal possibilities and impossibilities
and the eternal non-being of worlds which, through God’s decree, have been rejected in
preference to the best of all possible worlds.
Finally, I wish to make a point of answering the question which you seem to find
unanswerable: “According to you, what is the meaning of the statement ‘Only things
exist’?” The answer is this: “Whoever says, of that which he accepts or affirms, that it is
not a thing is in error.”* I would hope that you will have no difficulty in understanding my
answer, since, as I believe, we have the same views about compound judgements and, in
particular, about what it is to accept or affirm the subject of a sentence while denying a
certain attribute of that subject. 27
III
To Oskar Kraus
Schönbühel, 24 Sept., 1909
Dear Friend:
… What you have to say about our scientific differences is both clear and precise.*
You do not understand my statement that, whenever we think about an object, we think
implicitly about each of its parts. 28 May I remind you of the thesis of our logic, according
to which the entire content must be the object of a positive judgement. Thus if I affirm
or accept a sparrow, I also affirm or accept a bird, because a bird is a logical part of the
* ”Es irrt, wer etwas anerkennt und es als real leugnet.”
* The date of this letter and the formulation of the first sentence are inaccurate in the German
edition.—R.M.C.