 To be a mere possibile, then, according to Wyman, is to be unactualized, i.e., it is, unqualifiedly, to be but to fail to exemplify “the special attribute of actuality”; it is to subsist rather than to exist (Quine 1948:  23).[19]  But perhaps equally important for fixing the nature of the modern possibilism-actualism debate was Quine’s explicit break from his nineteenth and early twentieth century predecessors on the ontological status of abstracta; speaking now in his own voice, he says: