The condition of realism, as I stated it in the Introduction, was that hope must address itself to a real chance of the hoped-for event's coming to pass. But what counts as a real chance? Here, already, we need to embark on some conceptual clarification.

The odds are apparently about a million to one, for instance, against your being struck by lightning in any given year. Is there, nevertheless, a real chance that this will happen to you? There is a sense in which that assertion of the odds itself constitutes an affirmative answer: yes, indeed, there really is such a chance, although it is a very, very slim one because misfortunes of this nature occur extremely rarely – only about one time in a million when you are out and about, to be more precise. But then, in that sense, the condition of realism would be met by any case where what one was hoping for wasn't something literally impossible, such as travelling back in time, however overwhelming one judged the odds against its happening to be – and that is plainly not what we intend when we recognize that hope has to be realistic to do its proper work.

Instead, we mean ‘realistic’ here in the sense in which it would be unrealistic to frame one's New Year resolutions, holiday arrangements and so forth on the basis that one might on any day in the coming twelve months be taken out by lightning – just as it would be still less realistic to erect such life-plans on the firm assumption that one will this year win millions on the Lottery. The chances are such in either case that it would be wildly impractical to spend any time worrying about or joyously anticipating the events in question, or even (except perhaps idly and momentarily) contemplating them at all. The condition of realism in relation to both our fears and our hopes, that is, carries an essential reference to the common-sense distinction between attention to the way the world objectively is, and fearful or wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking, which this opposition distinguishes specifically from hope, we could define for the moment as the process of letting one's desires play a larger role in generating one's expectations about what will happen than the facts relevant to what is likely to happen actually warrant.