ABSTRACT
With his usual subversive brilliance Lewis Carroll brings out the mystified character of the notion of logical necessity in his mischievous little piece for Mind in 1895. Both logical necessity and physical necessity are notions that have come in for a share of mystification in the modern era. I have suggested earlier that this is because the great secularizing project of the seventeenth century gave them theological work to do. Our job at the moment is to look at that work and to try to bring those notions back to earth and to concrete reality. An associated task that will be left to later will be to understand the circumstances of, the motivations for, and the mechanisms of their original inflation and projection out of the world to reign as “other-worldly” or “transcendental” forces set over and above human beings, holding humans in their grip and determining human reason and human actions.
