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'\[B\]eing' is thoroughly ambiguous. It _can_ be understood as signifying a concrete existent, but it can also have the meaning-\--to use Gilson's words-\--of 'a property common to all that can rightly be said to be.' This 'being as such' is readily capable of hypostatization; it can then be regarded as itself an ultimate existent, 'more real' than the concrete existing things. Further, even if with that as a past \[sic: surely Leclerc means, as Gilson says, _present_\] participle in, for example, the phrase 'the being of a thing.'  In the former \[use\] it would refer to the 'nature' or 'essence' of the thing; in the latter\[,\] to 'the fact that' the thing exists. All this ambiguity has, in much of the philosophical thought of the past, led to grave difficulties and error through the implicit shifting from one meaning to the other.