IV
This universal, this actually commonplace character of our human form of consciousness, first appears, if you will, as just an arbitrary fact of life. But it gives rise, we have said, to the whole problem of Being, as we men face that problem, and to the various definitions of the ontological predicate. What for us is real, is viewed as an Other that, if in its wholeness completely present, would consciously end at least so much of the finite search as could by any possibility be ended. It is true that, in ordinary life, we learn to make a very sharp distinction between the wished for and the real. And this distinction is, indeed, in the world of common sense, a very unconquerable one. It is also true, that realism, in its abstract sundering of facts from desire, would seem often to have abandoned entirely any effort to win for our consciousness any final satisfaction in the presence of reality. But it is also true that such separation of what is real from what is desirable, is a secondary result, in the consciousness of every one of us. Primarily, in seeking Being, we seek what is to end our disquietude. But secondarily we do, indeed, usually learn by experience that, since not all finite desires can be satisfied, more is won, for our finite striving, by making the desire to know what we ordinarily call facts a primal motive in the more rational life of common sense; while our desire merely to gratify this or that momentary impulse becomes a secondary matter, which we learn to oppose to the general desire to know. In time we thus come to hold, in the world of finite common sense, that much is
