25. THE TRANSCENDENTAL ATTRIBUTES OR PROPERTIES OF BEING: UNITY, TRUTH, AND GOODNESS.—So far, we have analysed the notions of Real Being, of Becoming or Change, of Being as Possible and as Actual, of Essence and Existence. Before approaching a study of the Categories or _Suprema Genera Entis_, the highest and widest modes in which reality manifests itself, we have next to consider certain attributes or properties of being which reveal themselves as co-extensive with reality itself. Taking human experience in its widest sense, as embracing all modes that are cognitive or allied with consciousness, as including intellect, memory, imagination, sense perception, will and appetite, as speculative, ethical or moral, and esthetic or artistic,—we find that the reality which makes up this complex human experience of ours is universally and necessarily characterized by certain features which we call the _transcendental attributes or properties of being_, inasmuch as they transcend all specific and generic modes of being, pervade all its categories equally, and are inseparable from any datum of experience. We shall see that they are not really distinct from the reality which they characterize, but only logically distinct from it, being aspects under which we apprehend it, negations or other logical relations which we necessarily annex to it by the mental processes whereby we seek to render it actually intelligible to our minds. The first in order of these ontological attributes is _unity_: the concept of that whereby reality considered in itself becomes a definite object of thought. The second in order is _truth_: which is the conception of reality considered in its relation to cognitive experience, to intellect. The third is _goodness_: the aspect under which reality is related as an object to appetitive experience, to will. Now when we predicate of any reality under our consideration that it is “one,” or “good,” or “true”—in the ontological sense to be explained,—that which we predicate is not a mere _ens rationis_, but something real, something which is really identical with the subject, and which is distinguished from the latter in our judgment only by a logical distinction. The attribution of any of these properties to the subject does not, however, add anything real to the latter: it adds merely some logical aspect involved in, or supposed by, the attribution. At the same time, this logical aspect gives us real information by making explicit some real feature of being not explicitly revealed in the concept of being itself, although involved in, and following as a property from, the latter.