addibility

English

Etymology

addible +‎ -ity

Noun

addibility (uncountable)

1. Capability of addition; capability of being added to or added together.

   Synonyms: increasability, increasableness

   Antonym: inaddibility

   • 1690, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London: Thomas Basset, Book 2, Chapter 28 “Of Clear and Obscure, Distinct and Confused Ideas,” p. 168,^[1]

     […] we have no more a clear Idea of infinite Parts in Matter, then we have a clear Idea of an infinite Number, by being able still to add new Numbers to any assigned Number we have: endless Divisibility giving us no more a clear and distinct Idea of actually infinite Parts, than endless Addibility (if I may so speak) gives us a clear and distinct Idea of an actually infinite Number:

   • 1731, Edmund Law, Notes in his translation of An Essay on the Origin of Evil by William King, Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn & J. Woodyer, Chapter 1, Section 3, p. 58,^[2]

     The generally receiv’d Notion of Eternity, as consisting in a continual addibility of successive Duration, is, I think, the very same thing as an infinite Series, and consequently liable to the same objections:

   • Late 18th–early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham, manuscript cited in Élie Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, Paris: Félix Alcan, Volume 3, 1904, note 55, p. 481,^[3]

     ’Tis vain to talk of adding quantities which after the addition will continue distinct as they were before, one man’s happiness will never be another man’s happiness: a gain to one man is no gain to another: you might as well pretend to add 20 apples to 20 pears, after which you had done that could not be 40 of any one thing but 20 of each just as there was before. This addibility of happiness of different subjects, however when considered rigorously it may appear fictitious, is a postulation without the allowance of which all political reasoning is at a stand:

   • 1886, William Leonard Courtney, Constructive Ethics‎^[4], London: Chapman & Hall, Part 2, Book 3, Chapter 2, p. 206:

     A magnified and non-natural man does not satisfy our idea of God: we cannot take the qualities of a limited individual, and supposing the qualities enormously exaggerated, flatter ourselves with the notion that we have imagined the Deity. In just the same way we cannot take an infinite addibility of moments to be the equivalent of eternity.