Capacity

Use in the book

The empty book establishes the first sense immediately: an infant soul is capable of all things without already containing them. The comparison distinguishes openness from accomplished knowledge. Later, sonship is given in capacity through the power to know, love, and prize as God does; the Holy Spirit makes that sonship actual through righteous and holy exercise. An endowment does not automatically produce the life for which it was given.

The language becomes deliberately immense when the understanding contains room for infinite blessedness. Traherne does not mean that the body occupies infinite physical volume. The mind can make things intellectually present, receive their relations, and extend love beyond its local position. Capacity is the condition of a happiness whose objects exceed finite consumption. Yet empty extension alone is not perfection. It needs the objects, apprehensions, affections, and activities through which the soul becomes richly alive.

V.4 applies the receptive sense to the field of divine operation. Infinite power must have an adequate capacity answering it; even nothing, understood as the privation of possible perfections, can be spoken of as capable of all in relation to omnipotence. The claim belongs to Traherne's speculative account of creation. It should not be detached from that argument and converted into a literal picture of a material container existing independently of God.

Places to read

1. I.1The blank book and infant soul are capable of receiving without yet containing.
2. I.99Potential sonship becomes actual through the Spirit and righteous valuation.
3. II.82Infinite space in understanding establishes the capacity for infinite blessedness.
4. IV.3The contrast between capacity and act is applied to human philosophical and Christian maturity.
5. V.4Infinite capacity answers divine power and provides room for bounty.

In this edition

“In capacity” generally means potentially, not in the modern administrative sense of holding an office. “Capable of all” describes receptivity; it does not assert that an infant already consciously knows every fact.

Potentiality and education

The distinction helps reconcile the book's two apparently opposed accounts of childhood. The infant is empty enough to receive an education and already gifted with a clear manner of apprehension. Neither description is a complete inventory of conscious knowledge. Early openness can be spoiled by custom; it can also be guided into understanding. Maturity should not suppress receptive wonder but give its powers their proper objects and sustained exercise. The fulfilled capacity is therefore richer than either untouched emptiness or a store of facts learned without enjoyment.