Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/73

54 to breathe or to dwell. The real also in general lives; for it is internally self-sustaining, as, to a more primitive mind, natural life may seem to be. And breathing is a well-known token of life. So to breathe is to be. The unreal again is like a wanderer or a stranger. But the real abides in its own house. So to be real is to dwell. Or again the real is the result of principles, it is what has grown. It is the outcome and goal of processes. It is both necessary and abiding. All such notions are easy to illustrate by the ontological phraseology of various tongues.

A third type of popular expressions gives us still another view of what it is to be. According to this portion, as it were, of the mere folk-lore of being, to be real means above all to be genuine or to be true. One sees this meaning, by contrast, in the very many popular names for objects whose unreality and illusoriness has once been detected. Such an unreal object may be called, if it is better than the objects believed to be real, an Ideal; but most of the numerous appellatives for the unreal objects are terms of reproach: such an unreality is an appearance, a delusion, a sham, a myth, a fraud, a phantasm, an imitation, a lie. By contrast the real is what you can depend upon. It is genuine, no mere imitation. It is true.

And thus we have indicated, although by no means exhausted, the scope of the ontological speech of the people. To be immediate, or, on the other hand, to be well founded in what is not immediate, and, thirdly, to be