Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/426

Rh resemble each other or the foregoing types. And finally, when you say, both of your own warm present inner experience, and of to-day’s price of wheat in Chicago or London, that these two have alike real Being, or when you add that the British Constitution is also a reality, is the ontological predicate applied to these different objects in anything like the same sense? And so does it not seem that, as the scholastics would have said, or as Aristotle himself remarked, Being, despite our Fourth Conception, persists in remaining an essentially equivocal word? Only, to us, at the present point reached in these lectures — to us who are no longer realists and who no longer love barren abstractions, the equivocation seems so great as to be altogether hopeless? We were to find unity. But are not the facts once more against us?

So much then merely for an impression as regards the hopelessness of any one final and still empirical unification of Being. But, on the other hand, if you look closer, does it not soon become afresh evident that all these various forms are indeed but mere variations of a single theme, mere differentiations of one idea, whose unity and universality remain indivisible amidst all its vicissitudes?

For, consider: What did we just observe about past and present? Attempt to abstract from any reference to past Being, and what becomes of any concrete notion of present Being? Where are you now? In this city, in this room, aware of yourself as this person? But if I ask you not merely how you know all this to be really so, but what you mean by these various expressions, you at once refer me to the past, not merely for your warrant,