there are no valid possibilities which are to remain in the end, and for God, merely possible and unfulfilled in this sense, namely in the sense that while they are needed for a specific purpose, they are still regarded as absent or as non-existent. But, on the other hand, we have also found that what a given finite purpose desires includes its own specific definition, as this one purpose rather than another, as this specific way of selecting facts. Now the more determinate the consciousness of such a purpose becomes, the more does such consciousness involve a selection of some facts rather than others, or an exclusion from Being of what is now regarded as merely and vainly or abstractly possible.
If you ask what manner of partial Being, from the point of view of our Fourth Conception, such abstractly conceived but concretely excluded facts possess, I answer, precisely the fragmentary sort of Being which the consciousness of a specific purpose, that is the consciousness of a particular attentive selection, consciously assigns to them. They are known as the excluded facts. They are defined by consciousness only in relatively general terms. As mere kinds of experience, the facts which attention thus excludes are themselves part of the very consciousness which forbids them to have any richer and more concrete Being than this character of remaining mere aspects of the whole. In this sense, but in this only, are they facts whose nature is experienced. And once more, in saying this, I refer to consciousness and to nothing else as my warrant for the meaning that I intend to convey. When one attends, when one chooses, when one finds a meaning at once specific and fulfilled, one
