of which we may later assert, or learn, whether it is or is not. Kant, who much insisted upon this abstraction of the what from the that, maintained the view that the predicate is, or is real, or exists, never, properly, makes any difference to the what of the object in question, or adds anything to the essence of this object. For a fairy, once fully conceived as a possible live creature, would change in no whit the what, the characterizing predicates which now belong to fairies, if such a fairy came, by a creative act, or by an evolutionary process, into real existence. Just so too, the what, to use Aristotle’s favorite example, is common to the planned house, and to the real house later built in conformity to the plan. The that of the house is what the builder’s work effects.
I give this most elementary of the metaphysical abstractions its place here at the outset of our discussions merely to remark, at once, first that, as said, the contrast in question corresponds to the contrast between the internal and external meaning of ideas, and then that we are not bound to suppose this abstraction final. As a fact, my own view of Being will in the end turn upon supplementing and transforming the abstraction, which is itself a mere stage on the way to insight. But for the first we borrow its phraseology from language, as the philosophers since Aristotle have done, and we make its true meaning our problem. The ontological predicate thus appears to us as, in Kant’s phrase, no true predicate at all, since the ontological predicate shall make no difference whatever to the conceivable characters of the object to which it is applied. And, to add Kant’s own famous example, a hundred real dollars, according to Kant, differ in no
