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REALISM AND MYSTICISM IN THOUGHT
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nameable essential or logical characters from a hundred ideal or possible dollars. It is my actual wealth that differs according as I do or do not own the real dollars. Yet, on the other hand, this so abstract ontological predicate, otherwise viewed, does indeed also appear as if it were the most momentous of all predicates, since precisely the is and the is not somehow are to express all the difference between the true story and the false rumor, between the sound witness and the liar, between waking life and dream, between history and myth, — yes, between the whole world and nothing at all.[1]
- ↑ Human thought must first sunder, in order perhaps later to reunite. One historical result of the present mode of abstractly contrasting the ontological predicate with all the other predicates of objects, was that first, Aristotle, and later the scholastic text-books, sometimes attempted a sort of external union, under one abstractly common name, of the very aspects thus first so carefully divided. In consequence the term “Being” often gets a usage that in passing I have merely to mention. The scholastic text-books, namely, as for instance the Disputations of Suarez, employ our terms much as follows. Being (ens), taken quite in the abstract, such writers said, is a word that shall equally apply both to the what and to the that. Thus if I speak of the being of a man, I may, according to this usage, mean either the ideal nature of a man, apart from man’s existence, or the existence of a man. The term “Being” is so far indifferent to both of the sharply sundered senses. In this sense Being may be viewed as of two sorts. As the what it means the Essence of things, or the Esse Essentiæ. In this sense, by the Being of a man, you mean simply the definition of what a man as an idea means. As the that, Being means the Existent Being, or Esse Existentiæ. The Esse Existentiæ of a man, or its existent being, would be what it would possess only if it existed. And so the scholastic writers in question always have to point out whether by the term Ens, or Being, they in any particular passage are referring to the what or to the that, to the Esse Essentiæ or to the Esse Existentiæ. On occasion, Scholastic usage also distinguishes Reality from Existence, by saying that the essence of a not yet existing, but genuine future fact can be called in some sense Real, apart from Existence, and that in general one can distinguish Real Essences from mere figments. But I have to mention this technical usage only to say at once that we ourselves shall be little troubled by it. In these lectures I shall always mean by Being the Real Being of things, the that. Nor shall I try to make any systematic difference in usage between Reality and Existence, or the adjectives real and existent. So long as the what and the that remain abstractly sundered in our investigation we shall call the what the essence, or again, the idea taken abstractly in its internal meaning. By contrast, the that, the Real Being of things, will at this stage appear to us as corresponding to what we at the last time called the External Meaning of our ideas. But by and by we shall indeed learn that this whole sundering of the what and the that is a false abstraction, — a mere necessary stage on the way to insight. We shall also find that objects can be Real in various degrees; but we shall not try, as many writers do, to speak only of certain grades of Reality as Existent. We shall use the latter terms interchangeably.
