Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/226

Rh A close study of this notion of what it is to be real seems therefore justified by our situation. And so next, during the remainder of the present lecture, I shall illustrate by various cases how objects recognized in one way or another by our thought may suggest this form of the ontological predicate. Then, at the next lecture, I shall follow very briefly some of the earlier stages of the differentiation of this view from Realism in technical philosophy, shall deal very summarily with the history of the conception since Kant (because only since Kant it has come to be fully differentiated from Realism), and finally, I shall show how this conception leads us inevitably beyond itself to a fourth and final view of Being.

As one of the purely popular meanings of the ontological predicate we found, in our second lecture, the notion that to be real is to give warrant to ideas, to be genuine. By contrast we found popular speech calling an object whose unreality has been detected, an appearance, a myth, or even a lie. The unreal object thus often gets, by a certain transfer, names which first seem naturally to belong rather to the false opinion, to the idea itself, that has misled the too credulous mind. On the other hand, the real can be depended upon. It does not deceive. In a word, it is true, and its Being is, somehow or other, more or less the same as its truth.

Such usage is so far only popular. It implies no conscious final definition of Being. But this popular speech has undoubtedly been influenced by a philosophical tradition that dates, in our European thought, back to Plato,