All experience compels your acknowledgment. What, then, is the fact that is present to you? Ask yourself: it is past. A fact is a fait accompli; its esse is in praeterito. The past compels the present, in some measure, at least. If you complain to the Past that it is wrong and unreasonable, it laughs. It does not care a snap of the finger for Reason. Its force is brute force. So then, you are compelled, brutally compelled, to admit that there is such an element in the world of experience as brute force. […]

Obsistence (suggesting obviate, object, obstinate, obstacle, insistence, resistance, etc.) is that wherein secondness differs from firstness; or, is that element which taken in connection with Originality, makes one thing such as another compels it to be.