The word if, like and, is an including or adding word; and it is also excluding. The word if extends actuality into possibility. It shows that otherness can always be.

If is a word which has pleasure and pain to it. It is associated with wonder, but it can be sober, matter-of-fact, even dull. The word if indefinitely approaches is; and if can be and, and have the identifying power of and.

What is brought to our minds by if and the words following, affects our minds; for the condition represented by the group of words is a kind of reality. As our imagination is good, the effect of if and the other words is strong and good.

The aspects of if can be seen in various sentences.

1. If it rains, our plans are off. —This if is one of sober placing of conditions. It welcomes the unknown; but the unknown is not so far off. There is no desire as such that rain fall; there is the awareness of the possibility. In all uses of if, possibility is seen as important.

2. If I were living in the third century A.D., perhaps I shouldn’t mind it. —This if goes further. It jolts the self. (If, however, can have a soothing purpose.) This sentence is like the first: something seen as not existing is welcomed as if it existed. Possibility is affirmed.

3. If I hadn’t done it, the situation would be worse. —In the previous two sentences, the thought went from something that wasn’t to a conclusion that was. In this sentence, the mental trip is from something that was to something that wasn’t. If is large enough to go from the is not to the is, and the other way round. All thought is a going from is to is not, or is not to is. The word if helps to show this.

4. If I had my character, Etherege, do this, do you think it would help the play? —The speaker here already is in a field of the possible—a play. But the possible is in motion. The possible is being dealt with as if it were effectively present. A character, not existing as a congressman from Kentucky does, or one’s busy aunt, has been acting in a certain field of reality, which I here call the possible, and which also could be called the imagined. (I, of course, must insist, in keeping with previous words, that this possible and this imagined be seen as real.) The character previously doing certain things in the imagined, is thought of as doing something else; and this doing something else is going to have an effect on something in the here world or actual world—that is, the play itself.

5. If I hadn’t been born, I shouldn’t be able to think of what it would mean if I hadn’t been born. —This if shows another phase of its power. It is used by a person to think of himself as not, and then relate himself as not to himself as being.

If can go indefinitely deep. It can make for conditions within the conditioned. It can tell stories of reality within stories. It has dimensions. It is various. It is the conjunction of imagined and unimagined. And it should be seen that any time we use it, something is happening to us, just as it happens when we say something without if. The self and if are close; and when the self grows as much as it can, if will be used with a greatness and propriety equal to its meaning.