useless. In so far Being appears as a sort of fate, or perhaps as a supreme authority, which judges our ideas and which may thwart them. On this side, what is, is often the undesired, and may seem the hopelessly evil. Meanwhile, there remain many ways in which we can define Being either more in terms of Immediacy or else more in terms of Ideas. But Fact and Idea, Immediacy and Thought, these are the factors whose contrast and whose conflict must determine what notion we can form of what it is to be. Some conceived union of elements furnished by these two factors that enter into our finite conflict constitutes, for any theory, the notion of reality.
And now at last we are ready, having summarized the vaguer popular views, and having seen what situation determines the whole effort to define Being, — we are ready, I say, to pass directly to the alternative conceptions of what it is to be real which have appeared in the course of the history of philosophy.
I say, these fundamental conceptions, as they gradually become differentiated in the course of the history of thought, are four in number. In this lecture I shall at some length define two of them. The others I shall not expound until later lectures, after a critical study of the first two has prepared the way.
But first let me name all the four. The mere list will not be very enlightening, but it will serve to furnish titles for our immediately subsequent inquiries. The first conception I shall call the technically Realistic definition of what it is to be. The second I shall call the Mystical conception. The third I cannot so easily name. I shall sometimes call it the typical view of modern Criti-
