Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/31

12 dependent, both for my ideas and for their organization, upon this or that philosophical or theological tradition (well known to every student of philosophy); and therefore I must early introduce into my work a sketch of certain philosophical traditions in which we are to be especially interested. Here, of course, you might expect to find, as such an historical introduction to our later critical enterprises, either a summary of the history of the principal religious ideas, or some account of the technical history of the Philosophy of Religion itself. Yet for neither of these two very natural enterprises shall I have time. My very fragmentary historical discussions will be limited to an attempt to depict some of the principal conceptions concerning the ultimate nature of Being, in other words to sketch the history of what one might call the ontological predicate of the expression to be, or to be real, used as a means of asserting that something exists. I shall dwell upon the nature of Being, because to assert that God is, or that the World is, or even, with Descartes, that I am, implies that one knows what it is to be, or in other words, what the so-called existential predicate itself involves. Now it is true that the existential predicate, the word is used to assert the real Being of any object, is often viewed as something of an absolutely simple, ultimate, and indescribable meaning. Yet even if this view were sound, the ultimate and the simple are, in philosophy, as truly and as much topics for reflective study as are the most complex and derived ideas of our minds. Moreover, a great deal of popular religion seems to involve the