Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/71

52 This fragmentary technical digression as to our terms thus ended, we return for a moment to popular speech.

Language, as commonly used, does not leave us altogether to the mercy of the perplexing separation of the ontological predicate from all the other, from what Kant called the true predicates of objects. The abstraction of the what and the that grew up slowly in men’s minds: it is seldom even now consciously completed in the minds of any but technical thinkers. As a fact, very many words and phrases which have an obvious reference to the what have gradually come to be used, in the popular ontological vocabulary, as means of indicating that an object is real. Of these many popular ways of expressing reality, three classes, just here, especially interest us, because they are preliminary hints, so to speak, of our various more technical conceptions of Being.

And first, then, in various tongues, we find used for