Yes, "if men were what they _should_ be, _could_ be, if all men were rational, all loved each other as brothers," then it would be a paradisiacal life.[220]--All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they--can, _i. e._ than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not they are _incapable_ of being; for to be capable means--really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataract see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataract successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot. The singularity of this assertion vanishes when one reflects that the words "it is possible that ..." almost never contain another meaning than "I can imagine that ...," _e. g._, It is possible for all men to live rationally, _i. e._ I can imagine that all, etc. Now,--since my thinking cannot, and accordingly does not, cause all men to live rationally, but this must still be left to the men themselves,--general reason is for me only thinkable, a thinkableness, but as such in fact a _reality_ that is called a possibility only in reference to what I _can_ not bring to pass, to wit, the rationality of others. So far as depends on you, all men might be rational, for you have nothing against it; nay, so far as your thinking reaches, you perhaps cannot discover any hindrance either, and accordingly nothing does stand in the way of the thing in your thinking; it is thinkable to you. As men are not all rational, though, it is probable that they--cannot be so. If something which one imagines to be easily possible is not, or does not happen, then one may be assured that something stands in the way of the thing, and that it is--impossible. Our time has its art, science, etc.; the art may be bad in all conscience; but may one say that we deserved to have a better, and "could" have it if we only would? We have just as much art as we can have. Our art of to-day is the _only art possible_, and therefore real, at the time. Even in the sense to which one might at last still reduce the word "possible," that it should mean "future," it retains the full force of the "real." If one says, _e. g._, "It is possible that the sun will rise to-morrow,"--this means only, "for to-day to-morrow is the real future"; for I suppose there is hardly need of the suggestion that a future is real "future" only when it has not yet appeared. Yet wherefore this dignifying of a word? If the most prolific misunderstanding of thousands of years were not in ambush behind it, if this single concept of the little word "possible" were not haunted by all the spooks of possessed men, its contemplation should trouble us little here.