Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/425

406 explained away as illusory instances, as mere appearances that have no true Being. But whether accepted or explained away, these sorts of beings must at all events be taken into account in attempting to define reality.

If, looking over the broad field suggested by the foregoing list of the sorts of beings recognized by ordinary human belief, we thereupon attempt to reduce to unity the characters possessed by these supposed objects in so far as they are said to be real, our next impression may be once more that, despite our Fourth Conception, the Being which the various classes of facts have in common can only be something extremely abstract and barren. If the past, say yesterday, or the Silurian period, has Being in some irrevocable sense, despite the fact that we also say, It no longer is, what has such a past in common with the present, except that each belongs to time? And have both past and present Being any less abstract character than this in common with the future, say with the coming history of Europe five centuries hence? Of that coming history we say, It is not yet. If in a sense it still has Being, because it also is even now the object of possible true or false assertions, has this type of Being still anything but the name in common with the past or with the present? Or again, if one compares the existence which the mathematician attributes to the roots of an equation of the nth degree, or to the irrational numbers and differential coefficients, with the existence that you now ascribe to your friend's mind, when you converse with him, — in what but the name do these types of Being