Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/74

Rh genuine and true, — these seem to be the three principal conceptions of what it is to be real in the popular ontology. Technical metaphysic, like all other learned enterprises, has its foundations in just such linguistic folk-lore, so to speak, as the foregoing; and one easily misapprehends the philosophers if one fails to observe whence they got their vocabulary. As Teichmüller, in the introduction to his own essay on metaphysics well says, the Aristotelian theory of Being is founded in part upon a series of grammatical and lexicographical comments upon the forms of speech used in Greek language. All the more philosophical conceptions of being are due, in part, to an attempt to take note of the same aspects of human experience which the three classes of popular ontological predicates have from an early stage recognized. And, as a fact, the ontological concepts are limited in their range of variation by a situation in which we all find ourselves, and of which the foregoing variations of the popular vocabulary have already reminded us. It is necessary, as we pass to the more technical realm, to sketch, in outline, what this familiar situation is. For the problem about Being is, like all other human problems, first of all a problem of experience, and of distinctly practical needs.

We all of us, from moment to moment, have experience. This experience comes to us, in part, as brute fact: light and shade, sound and silence, pain and grief and joy, — all these, in part, i.e. in one of their universal aspects, are just data of sense, of emotion, of inner life in general. These given facts flow by; and, were they all, our world would be too much of a blind problem for us