Page "Being" Paragraph 34

Whether or not an object is present in a set ; that is, exists there as a being, is based on universal experience or evidence of it.

Existing objects are present to the experience of anyone.

It is a legitimate goal therefore for philosophers of being to try to find a principle or element – a " something " – accounting for the presence of the object over the other possibility, its non-presence.

Instead, the philosopher encounters a problem :" Now, if the ' to be ' of a thing could be conceived apart from that which exists, it should be represented in our mind by some note distinct from the concept of the thing itself ....

In point of fact, it is not so.

There is nothing we can add to a concept in order to make it represent the object as existing ; what happens if we add anything to it is that it represents something else.