ABSTRACT
The form-giving flexion Being, whether in its attributive or predicative function, is not fulfilled, as we said, in any percept. We here remember Kant’s dictum: Being is no real predicate. This dictum refers to being qua existence, or to what Herbart called the being of ‘absolute position’, but it can be taken to be no less applicable to predicative and attributive being. In any case it precisely refers to what we are here trying to make clear. I can see colour, but not being-coloured. I can feel smoothness, but not beingsmooth. I can hear a sound, but not that something is sounding. Being is nothing in the object, no part of it, no moment tenanting it, no quality or intensity of it, no figure of it or no internal form whatsoever, no constitutive feature of it however conceived. But being is also nothing attaching to an object: as it is no real (reales) internal feature, so also it is no real external feature, and therefore not, in the real sense, a ‘feature’ at all. For it has nothing to do with the real forms of unity which bind objects into more comprehensive objects, tones into harmonies, things into more comprehensive things or arrangements of things (gardens, streets, the phenomenal external world). On these real forms of unity the external features of objects, the right and the left, the high and the low, the loud and the soft etc., are founded. Among these anything like an ‘is’ is naturally not to be found.
