§ 2. There are good and obvious reasons why we should adhere, in the form of our inquiry, to the main outlines of this traditional scheme. It is true that it is largely a question of simple convenience what order we adopt in a systematic metaphysical investigation. A genuinely philosophical survey of the general character of knowledge and experience would exhibit so complete a systematic unity, that you might start from any point in it and reach the same results, much as you may go round a circle equally well from any point of the periphery. But for the beginner, at any rate, it is advantageous to start with the general question what we mean by Being or Reality, and what character is to be ascribed to the whole of Being as such, before attacking the problem of the particular kind of Being which belongs to the various “realities” of common life and the special sciences. Thus we have to discuss in the first part of our programme such questions as the relation of Being in general to experience, the sense in which Being may be said to be inseparable from, and yet again to transcend, experience; the problem of the existence of different kinds or degrees of Being; the question whether Being is ultimately one or many; the relation between Real Being and its appearances. All these problems correspond with reasonable closeness to the contents of what was traditionally known as Ontology. It is only when we have reached some definite conclusion on these most fundamental questions that we shall be in a position to deal with the more special problems suggested by the various departments of science and common life; hence we shall do well to acquiesce in the arrangement by which Ontology was made to precede the other divisions of the subject. Again, in dealing with the more complex special problems of Metaphysics, it is natural to recognise a distinction corresponding to the separation of Cosmology from Rational Psychology. Common language shows that for most of the purposes of human thought and action the contents of the world of experience tend to fall into the two groups of mere things and things which are sentient and purposive—Physical Nature on the one hand, and Minds or Spirits on the other. We must, of course, be careful not to confuse this division of the objects of experience with the distinction between an experienced object as such and the subject of experience. We are to start, in our critical investigation, not with the artificial point of view of Psychology, which sets the “subject” of presentations over-against the presentations considered as conveying information about “objects of knowledge,” but with the standpoint of practical life, in which the individual agent is opposed to an environment itself consisting largely of similar individual agents. It is not “Nature” on the one side and a “perceiving mind” on the other, but an environment composed partly of physical things, partly