He wondered what he was thinking about when he thought about necessity and contingency? The concepts were slippery and became confused with each other. Necessity could refer to logical necessity, the idea of necessary truth, or of being true is any possible world and so on, or necessity could refer to the inexorable brute fact to which one must finally, if reluctantly defer. This latter, necessity of the will, seemed to be the version that, to encounter and come to terms with, spelt wisdom. The other necessity, the necessity in the ideal, perhaps had the opposite effect, it was a licence for the mind to get ahead of itself, to claim a god-like kinship with truth, to mistake itself for the fount of wisdom. Or at least to be licensed to build a philosophical system of its own. And contingency, then? Surely this again referred to the brute fact that could not be melted away by any recourse to idealism, and was therefore the same as what was meant by the necessity of the will. There was an allusive force to the word contingency, which rather attracted him. It needed to be opposed to the logically necessary, and in making these oppositions or connections he was merely thinking out variants of the relations of thinking and being. The contingently necessary thus pointed to the universe as progressively distinguished out of pure freedom, while the necessarily contingent to the extraordinary quality of everyday events, their givenness. Finding himself in a contingent world, and thus a world in which the will was confronted by pure necessity, he discovered that he could know himself only in such a world, and hence its necessary contingency. The necessity in this way belonged to his own deepest nature, but as the trace of a yet more essential freedom. As if necessity necessarily could only be necessity if it were contingently so.