Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus | Page 2

if a thing can occur in a state of
affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the
thing itself.
2.0121 It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a
situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own. If
things can occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them
from the beginning. (Nothing in the province of logic can be merely
possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its
facts.) Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside
space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we
can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others. If
I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine
them excluded from the possibility of such combinations.
2.0122 Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all
possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of
connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is impossible
for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves, and in
propositions.)

2.0123 If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in
states of affairs. (Every one of these possibilities must be part of the
nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot be discovered later.
2.01231 If I am to know an object, thought I need not know its external
properties, I must know all its internal properties.
2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states
of affairs are also given.
2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs.
This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without
the space.
2.0131 A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial
point is an argument-place.) A speck in the visual field, thought it need
not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by
colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch
some degree of hardness, and so on.
2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
2.0141 The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of
an object.
2.02 Objects are simple.
2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a
statement about their constituents and into the propositions that
describe the complexes completely.
2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they
cannot be composite.
2.0211 If they world had no substance, then whether a proposition had
sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.
2.0212 In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true
or false).

2.022 It is obvious that an imagined world, however difference it may
be from the real one, must have something--a form--in common with it.
2.023 Objects are just what constitute this unalterable form.
2.0231 The substance of the world can only determine a form, and not
any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that
material properties are represented--only by the configuration of
objects that they are produced.
2.0232 In a manner of speaking, objects are colourless.
2.0233 If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction
between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are
different.
2.02331 Either a thing has properties that nothing else has, in which
case we can immediately use a description to distinguish it from the
others and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things that
have the whole set of their properties in common, in which case it is
quite impossible to indicate one of them. For it there is nothing to
distinguish a thing, I cannot distinguish it, since otherwise it would be
distinguished after all.
2.024 The substance is what subsists independently of what is the case.
2.025 It is form and content.
2.0251 Space, time, colour (being coloured) are forms of objects.
2.026 There must be objects, if the world is to have unalterable form.
2.027 Objects, the unalterable, and the subsistent are one and the same.
2.0271 Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their
configuration is what is changing and unstable.
2.0272 The configuration of objects produces states of affairs.

2.03 In a state of affairs objects fit into one another like the links of a
chain.
2.031 In a state of affairs objects stand in a determinate relation to one
another.
2.032 The determinate way in which objects are connected in a state of
affairs is the structure of the state of affairs.
2.033 Form is the possibility of structure.
2.034 The structure of a fact consists of the structures of