  Ontology, according to Rosmini’s description of it, considers being in all its universality, but only as the object of human thought which puts limited, intellectual beings in contact with the possibility of all that is, not with actuality (it is impossible, for instance, to assuage hunger by thinking about a meal). Thought must, therefore, reach out to absolute reality not through direct perception of God, but by means of concepts. Ontology, dealing with these concepts analytically and synthetically is, as it were, an immense preface to rational theology. Ontology as the theory of being in all its possibility is the necessary propedeutic to theology as the theory of absolute being without which ontology itself is inevitably incomplete, and cannot progress beyond a treatise on categories and on dialectic.