Bibliography

The Rationale of Reasoning

I call anything “real” be it anything asserted, or imagined, or conceived, or any element of such assertion, image, or concept, or of whatever other sort it may be, if, and only if, it possesses characters which it would possess, just the same, whether […] you or I, or anybody else, or everybody living during any limits of time, opines, fancies, or otherwise thinks it possesses them, or not. Almost everybody and everything possesses some characters that are not of this description.

…I use the word “tendency” to denote, in the concrete a real would-be, and in the abstract the reality of a would-be, which is not the cause but is the reality of a disposition in a kind of event, whether produced by a cause or merely by the absence of any determining cause, in consequence of which[,] or more accurately speaking by the meaning of which expression[,] that kind of event, if the tendency were known[,] could be predicted to happen, either invariably, or usually, or often, or sometimes, as the case might be, in the long run.