Under the spell of Hopkins, who was under the spell of Scotus, I have in the foregoing pages made much of the way in which the first of these writers alters the spelling of haecceitas to ecceitas. I have made much also of the tie that both of these authors see between this Latin word or these Latin words and the notion of being as existence. For although, as argued by Scotus against Giles of Rome, existence is not necessarily the cause or ground of thisness, thisness may entail existence. This tie led me to a further connection, that of existence and the goodness of its existence for each existent, whether or not the existent can itself express the claim to existence that is grounded on the goodness for the existent of its existence or depends on other existents to speak or to imagine themselves speaking as advocates on its behalf.

My responsibility to speak for existents as such does not exclude my responsibility towards what might be considered not to fall within the category of existents, for instance the unborn, the dead, spectres or ghosts, reference to which we might think it necessary to qualify with the conditional clause ‘if there be any such thing(s)’, or ‘if there were any such thing(s)’. This is a conditional clause with which many people would want to qualify any reference to God or G-D or a god. These people would include those who would experience difficulty reading a study of Scotus and Hopkins which, like this one, makes only passing reference to Divinity. Both Scotus and Hopkins are so committed to a metaphysics of God, existence and salvation that there would appear to be no viable route from such a metaphysics to the universes of discourse inhabited by the modern, postmodern or post-postmodern authors whose work is placed alongside that of Scotus and Hopkins in the chapters of this study.

The thought of this dilemma drove me close to abandoning my project. Casting around for a methodology that would legitimate my not giving up my purpose, I first bethought myself of the way by which Levinas postpones his theological reflections until he has expounded his humanism of the other human being.