The Essentials of Logic, Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and Inference

by Bernard Bosanquet

LECTURE X INDUCTION, DEDUCTION, AND CAUSATION

1. Induction 151 a. By simple Enumeration 151 b. Enumeration always has a Ground 152 c. Perfect Induction 152 d. System 153 e. Analogy as Step towards System 155 f. Negative Instance 158 g. Classification and Generalisation 159 h. Hypothesis 161

2. Deduction 162 a. Subsumption 163 b. Construction 163

3. Causation 164

4. The Postulate of Knowledge 165

5. Conclusion 166

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LECTURE I THE PROBLEM OF LOGIC

Difficulty of the science

1. There is no science more difficult than that on which we are entering in these lectures. It is worth while to discuss the nature of this difficulty. It is a question of interest rather than of intricacy. All sciences have, perhaps, much the same possibilities of broad theory and subtle analysis. But Logic stands alone in the difficulty with which the student sustains his persuasion that its point of view is worth applying.

In most other sciences, even in the philosophical sciences, there is a continual stimulus to sense-perception, to curiosity, to human interest. The learner is called upon to dissect animals or plants, to undertake delicate manipulations with beautifully contrived instruments, to acquaint himself with the history of nations, with the genesis of worlds, with strange and novel speculations upon the nature of space, or with the industry and well-being of various classes among mankind at the present day. And these elements of novelty, these stimulations of sense-perception or of practical interest, carry us forward imperceptibly, and sustain our {2} eagerness to analyse and combine in theoretic completeness the novel matter thus constantly impinging upon us.

In Philosophy, and more especially in Logic, we can promise little or nothing of this kind. The teacher of Philosophy, from Socrates downwards, has talked about common things, things already familiar to his hearers. And although he calls upon them to think of these things in a peculiar way, and from an unaccustomed point of view, yet it is likely to be felt that he is demanding a new effort, without supplying a new interest. And it is a common experience, that after a time the mind rebels against this artificial attitude, which fatigues without instructing, if we have accustomed ourselves to understand by instruction the accumulation of new sense-perceptions and the extension of historical or scientific vision over a wider superficial area.

Now this I cannot help, and I will not disguise. In Philosophy, and in Logic above all, it must be so. The whole point and meaning of the study is that in it we re-traverse familiar ground, and survey it by unfamiliar processes. We do not, except accidentally, so much as widen our mental horizon. For those who care to understand, to trace the connecting principles and functions that permeate our intellectual world, there is indeed an interest of a peculiar kind. But even experienced students will occasionally feel the strain of attending to difficult distinctions, entirely without the excitement of novelty in sense-perception or of a practical bearing upon human life. It is this that makes Logic probably the hardest of all the sciences.

{3} The problem stated

2. We cannot hope to vanquish this difficulty unless we face it boldly from the first. There are in the old-fashioned Logic-books tricks and puzzles, fallacies and repartees, which can in some degree be made amusing; but of these I do not intend to speak. The course by which alone I can hope honestly to awaken a true logical interest among any who may be quite unfamiliar with the subject, is to approach the matter descriptively, and try to set before you fully and fairly what the problem is which the process of knowledge has to meet. And then it may be possible to claim a genuine theoretical curiosity—none the less genuine that it may be tinged with a sympathy for man’s common birthright of intelligence—for the detailed explanation of the means by which this problem is solved from day to day. Such an explanation is the science of Logic.

The problem may be thus introduced. Several of those present have, I believe, attended a previous course of lectures on Psychology. They have learned, I presume, to think of the mind as the course of consciousness, a continuous connected presentation, more or less emphasising within it various images, and groups of images and ideas, which may be roughly said to act and re-act upon each other, to cohere in systems, and to give rise to the perception of self. This course of consciousness, including certain latent elements, the existence of which it is necessary to assume, is an individual mind, attached to a particular body, and so far as we know, not separable from the actions and affections of that body. What is the connection between such a course of consciousness in any individual, and the world as that individual knows and wills it? This is the point at {4} which Psychology passes into Logic. Psychology treats of the course of ideas and feelings; Logic of the mental construction of reality. How does the course of my private ideas and feelings contain in it, for me, a world of things and persons which are not merely in my mind?

World as Idea

3. Schopenhauer called his great work, The World as Will and Idea. [1] Leaving out Will for the moment, let us consider the world “as Idea.”

“‘The world is my idea;’ [2] this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as an idea, i.e. only in relation to something else, the consciousness which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this; for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, space, or causality, for they all pre-suppose it.

…..

“No truth, therefore, is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of {5} what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.”

[1] E. Tr. (Trubner, 1883).

[2] Schopenhauer, op. cit. beginning.

The world, then, for each of us, exists in the medium of our mind. It is a sort of building, of which the materials are our ideas and perceptions.

The “world”

4. So much for “idea.” What do we mean by “world”? A succession of images passing before us, or rather making up our consciousness, like a dream, is not a world. The term is very expressive; it is a favourite word in Shakespeare. When the courtier says —

“Hereafter, in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you,”

he does not mean, as I used to think, “in heaven”; he means in a better condition of social affairs. In “mad world, mad kings, mad composition,” the term means more especially the set of political and family connections within which extraordinary reversals of behaviour have just taken place. Often we use the expression, with a qualifying epithet, to indicate some particular sphere of connected action, “the ecclesiastical world,” “the political world,” and so forth. Always there seems to be implied the notion of a set of things or persons bound together by some common quality which enables them to act upon each other, and to constitute what is technically termed a “whole.” The “world” par excellence, then, ought to mean the one connected set of things and persons which we all recognise {6} and refer to as the same, and as including ourselves along with all who use the word in the same sense.

Then the “world as idea” means no less than this, that the system of things and persons which surrounds all of us, and which each of us speaks of and refers to as the same for every one, exists for each of us as something built up in his own mind—the mind attached to his own body—and out of the material of his own mind.

The animal’s world

5. Let us illustrate this building up by thinking of the world, our surroundings, as an animal must be aware of it. The lowest beginnings of sight, for example, give no colour and no shape. An animal in this stage can, probably, only just take warning if a dark object comes between him and the light. Therefore he cannot have the ordered visual image of space definitely stretching away all round him, which is the primary basis of our idea of a world. He can move, no doubt, but there is nothing to make us suppose that he records and co-ordinates the results of his movements into anything like that permanent order of objects which must be constructed in some way by a human being even though born blind. Succession, we might say, is much more powerful with animals than co-existence; but we should have to guard ourselves against supposing that this was what we mean by succession, that is, a process definitely recognised as in time, with a connection of some reasonable kind between its phases. For the most part with animals out of sight is out of mind; if so, the present is not interpreted, enlarged, and arranged with reference to what is not present in time or space by them as it is by us. And therefore the consciousness of a single system of things, {7} permanent, and distinct from the momentary presentations of the senses, cannot, in all probability, grow up for them. If so, they have no real world, but only a dream world, [1] i.e. a world not contrasted with the stream of presentation, nor taken as the common theatre of all actions and events. This difference between the world of an animal and that of a human being, is a rough measure of what man does by mental or intellectual construction in making his world.

[1] The character of the sensory powers, which are strongest in many animals, contributes to this conclusion. Mr. F.H. Bradley is sure that his dog’s system of logic, if he had one, would run, “What exists smells; what does not smell is nothing.” The sense of smell can scarcely give rise to the idea of a world of objects. It has hardly any capacity of structural discernment.

The world as objective

6. We have now got the idea of a “world,” as a system of things and persons connected together, taken to be the same for oneself at different times and for different minds at the same time, yet existing, for oneself, in the medium of one’s individual consciousness.

We see at once that we cannot stop here. We have really got a contradiction. If the parts of our world are connected with each other, they are not merely dependent upon us, that is, upon the changes of our consciousness. And we all take them to be independent of us, in the sense that we do not suppose the presence or absence of our perception to make any difference to the world except by the continuance or cessation of our perception of it or of its parts. This is the state of mind in which we practically live, philosophers and all. I do not really take notice of any difference in mode of existence between the wall in front of me, which I see, and the wall behind me, which I {8} do not see. While you are in this lecture-hall, if you think of your rooms at home, you think of them as they look, that is, as they would look if you were there to see them. How else, indeed, could you think of them? This is practically necessary, and therefore, for practical purposes, true.

But if you take it as a theory, omitting the hypothetical factor, “if I was there to see,” you go wrong. You then treat your world as being, outside your consciousness, the same that it is inside your consciousness, without allowing for the withdrawal of your consciousness. You are then on the way to think that the world, as you see, hear, and feel it, is outside your mind, and that the sight, hearing, feeling, and the ideas born of them, are inside your mind as a sort of faint and imperfect copy of the world which you then call “external,” in the sense of outside the mind.

Common sense

i. The first position was that of common sense. The second is that of common-sense theory. Common sense is quite justified. It says, “Things affect each other, but the mere presence and absence of our perception does not affect them.” For practical purposes we must treat them as being, when unapprehended by our minds, just the same as when apprehended by our minds. This is the first idea or rather postulate—for it is not a theoretical idea—of objectivity. Objective = “independent of our consciousness for practical purposes.”

Common-sense theory

ii. In describing the second position as that of common-sense theory I do not refer to the doctrine of any regular school of philosophers. There was a Scotch school of philosophy—the school of Reid in the eighteenth century—commonly called the common-sense school. I will say {9} below how I think this school was related to the position which I am now describing. But my present purpose is to hit off the simple theory of reality which common-sense people make for themselves when they reflect. Now this theory, in which we all live except when we make a special effort, accepts the distinction between things and the mind. For example, it defines truth as the conformity of ideas to objects. That means something of this kind: the ideas are inside our heads, and the objects are outside our heads. If we are to have knowledge, the objects have to be represented inside our heads, and they get in through the senses. And then you have two similar forms of the world, one outside our heads, which is real, and another like it but less perfect and without solidity or causal power, inside our heads, which is ideal or mental. This is what I call the common-sense theory of the Objective. Like common sense, it assumes that there is a world which the withdrawal of our individual consciousness does not affect, but which persists and acts all the same. Unlike common sense, it lays down an assertion as to the nature of this world, viz. that it is, apart from our consciousness, the same as it is for our consciousness. The world in consciousness, it assumes, is subjective, the world out of consciousness is objective, and the former is an imperfect copy of the latter in a feebler material.

The schools of common-sense philosophy, such as are represented by Locke and Reid, are not quite so simple-minded as the reflection of ordinary common sense, because every systematic thinker sees at once that the question stares him in the face, “If the world outside the mind is copied {10} by the world inside the mind, how can we ever know whether the copy conforms to the original?” We are by the hypothesis inside the mind; whatever has passed through the senses is inside the mind. We cannot as at present advised get at anything outside the senses or outside the mind. In face of this question, the common-sense philosophies have two courses open. They may start from the idea of things outside the mind, but admit that in passing through the senses the things are in some partial respects transformed—as for instance, that they acquire colour, sound, and smell in passing through the senses—this is what Locke says. Or again, still starting from the idea of things outside the mind, they may simply assert that perception is of such a nature that it gives us things as they really are. The former was the view of Locke, the latter that of Reid. This latter view obviously might pass into the most extreme idealism, and its interpretation, if it does not so pass, is exceedingly difficult.

But whatever may have been the view of the historical “common-sense school,” [1] the common-sense theory which we all make for ourselves involves a separation between the mind and reality. The objective world is the world as independent of mind, and independent of mind means existing and acting outside mind, exactly, or almost exactly, as it seems to exist and act before the mind.

[1] See Seth, Scottish Philosophy (Blackwood, 1885).

Now this is an absolute cul-de-sac. If the objective is that which is outside perception, the objective is out of our reach, and the world of our perception can never be objective. This is the pass to which we are brought by taking {11} common sense as the guide of theory and not as its material.

Philosophical theory.

iii. There is no way out but by retracing our steps, and avoiding a false turn which we took in passing from common sense to common-sense theory. It was quite true that the world is unaffected by the withdrawal of my individual perception and consciousness (except in so far as I acted qua bodily thing in the world); but it does not follow from this that if it becomes the object of a consciousness in me, it can be so otherwise than as presented within that consciousness. We must distinguish between the idea that the objective is outside consciousness and therefore not in consciousness, and the idea that the objective can be in the individual consciousness, but identified with something beyond the individual consciousness. It may be that consciousness is capable of containing a world, not as a copy of a ready-made original, but as something which it makes for itself by a necessary process, and which refers beyond this finite and momentary consciousness.

According to these ideas, the objective is, shortly stated, whatever we are obliged to think. This, though it is in our thought, is not considered merely as our thought, or as a train of images or whole of presentation in our minds. That is an artificial point of view, the point of view of psychology, and we must carefully avoid starting from it. But knowledge refers beyond its mental self, and has no limitation in time or in kind except its own necessity. Thus, I am forced to think, by a certain context of ideas and perceptions, that there is now a fire burning in my study at home. This judgment is not barred by the fact that my mind, as a {12} function attached to my body, is here three miles away. The thought is objective for me, so long as I am obliged to think it. My presence in or absence from the room where the fire is burning has no effect on the question, except as it furnishes me with evidence one way or the other. Not only absence in space is no obstacle, but succession in time is no obstacle. My thought, which is here and now, refers confidently to what has happened in long intervals of time, if the necessity of consistency obliges it to do so. Thus if I go back to my room and find the fire out and the room very cold, I infer without hesitation to certain acts and events which are needed to explain this state of things. And interpretations or explanations of this kind make up my world, which is for me in my thought, but is presented as more than my thought, and cannot be a world at all unless it is more than in my thought. It is in as far as my thought constructs and presents a world which is more than my momentary psychical state, that my thought, and the world as presented to me in it, is objective. The world is not a set of my ideas, but it is a set of objects and relations of which I frame an idea, and the existence of which has no meaning for me except as presented in the idea which 1 frame. We are not to think of (i) Ideas, and (ii) Things which they represent; the ideas, taken as parts of a world, are the things.

We begin to see, then, how the nature of knowledge meets the puzzle which I stated above. How, I asked, can a connected “world,” whose parts act on one another quite independently of my perception, be in my individual mind? I answer that it does not follow, because the world is for me {13} only in my presentation, that my presentation is the only thing which goes on in the world. “What I am obliged to think” may represent a real development depending on laws and a system which is not confined to my individual course of consciousness. The “objective” in this sense is for Logic an assumption, or rather a fact to be analysed. We do not attempt to prove its existence, except in the sense of calling attention to its nature in detail. It will be seen that “outside the mind” ceases, on this view of objectivity, to have meaning as regards anything that can be related to us. “Outside” is a relation of bodies to one another; but everything, about which we can so much as ask a question, is so far inside the mind, i.e. given in its continuum of presentation or idea.

I will recapitulate the three conceptions of the “objective.”

(1) According to practical “common sense” the objective is independent of our consciousness in the sense that the presence or absence of our consciousness makes no difference to the operation of things upon each other.

(2) According to “common-sense theory” the objective is independent of our consciousness in the sense that the presence or absence of our consciousness makes no difference in the mode of being of things (viz. that the world in consciousness approaches objectivity by resembling or reproducing a similar and quite objective world outside consciousness).

(3) According to philosophical theory the objective is independent of our consciousness in the sense that it is what we are constrained to think in order to make our consciousness consistent with itself. “What we are constrained to {14} think” is not confined, in its reference to our thought, or to thought at all.

Our separate worlds.

7. Thus, for the purposes of Logic, we must turn our usual ideas upside down. We must try to imagine something of this kind. We have all seen a circular panorama. Each one of us, we must think, is shut up alone inside such a panorama, which is movable and flexible, and follows him wherever he goes. The things and persons depicted in it move and act upon one another; but all this is in the panorama, and not beyond it. The individual cannot get outside this encircling scenery, and no one else can get inside it. Apart from it, prior to it, we have no self; it is indeed the stuff of which oneself is made. Is every one’s panorama exactly the same? No, they are not exactly the same. They are formed round different centres, each person differing from all the others by individual qualities, and by his position towards the points and processes which determine his picture. For—and here is the remarkable point—every one of us has painted for himself the picture within which he is shut up, and he is perpetually painting and re-painting it, not by copying from some original, but by arranging and completing confused images and tints that are always appearing magically on his canvas. Now this magical panorama, from which the individual cannot escape, and the laws of which are the laws of his experience, is simply his own mind regarded as a content or a world. His own body and mind, regarded as things, are within the panorama, just as other people’s bodies and minds are. The whole world, for each of us, is our course of consciousness, in so far as this is regarded as a system of objects which we are obliged to {15} think. Not, in so far as it really is a system, for an onlooker, say for a psychologist. For no doubt every child’s mind, and every animal’s mind, is a working system of presentations, which a psychologist may study and analyse from without. Consciousness is consciousness of a world only in so far as it presents a system, a whole of objects, acting on one another, and therefore independent of the presence or absence of the consciousness which presents them.

I take another very rough metaphor to explain this curious contrast between my mind as a working system, observable from without, and belonging to my individual body—distinguishable from the thirty or forty quite different minds belonging to the thirty or forty persons in this room—and my mind as a continuum of presentations which includes, as objects, itself, and all the other minds in the room, and the whole world so far as I have any conscious relation to it whatever.

All of us are familiar with the appearance of a microscope ready adjusted for use, with its little lamp, its mirror and illuminating apparatus under the stage, with a specimen on the stage under the object-glass, its object-glass and its eye-piece. Any one who understands the working of a microscope finds this a most suggestive spectacle. He follows in his imagination the light as it comes from the lamp to the mirror, through the illuminating lenses, through the transparent specimen, through perhaps a dozen lenses arranged as an object-glass within an inch of distance, through the eye-piece and into the observer’s eye. Give him the parts, lenses, prisms, and mirrors into his hands, and he will test them all, and tell you exactly how they work. This {16} scientific onlooker may be compared to the psychologist looking at another man’s mind. He sees it as a thing among other things, a working system of parts.

But there is one thing that the mere onlooker cannot see. He cannot see the object. That can only be seen by looking through the tube. And every one has felt, I should think, the magical transformation, suggestive of looking through another man’s eye and mind, which occurs when you put your eye to the eye-piece of an optical instrument. The outside world of other objects, the tube, the stage, the mirror, the bystanders, the external light, all disappear, and you see nothing but the field of vision and whatever distinctly pictured structure may be displayed within it. The observer who looks through the tube may be compared with each one of us as he contemplates his own world of knowledge and perception. This is a thing that no one else can ever do.

The metaphor, indeed, breaks down, in so far as each of us is able to observe the history and character of his own mind as an object within the field of presentation which is before his mind. Of course such a metaphor must break down at some point. But it remains true that the mind, while directly observing its field of objects, cannot observe its own peculiarities, and when turned, as we say, upon itself, is still observing only a part of itself. It remains true that my mind contains the whole presented world for me and is merely one among thousands of similar mind-things for you.

Thus, I repeat, the world for each of us is our course of consciousness, looked at in that way in which it presents a {17} systematic, organised picture of inter-acting objects, not in that way in which it is a stream of ideas and feelings, taking place in our several heads. In the former point of view it is the world as our idea; in the latter point of view it is simply the consciousness attached to our body. We might soon puzzle ourselves with the contradictions which arise if we fail to distinguish these points of view. In one sense my mind is in my head, in the other sense my head is in my mind. In the one sense I am in space, in the other sense space is in me. Just so, however rough the metaphor, from one point of view the microscope is one among a host of things seen from the outside; from the other point of view all that we see is in the microscope, which is itself not seen at all.

It is in this latter sense that our mental equipment is looked at, when it is regarded as knowledge; and it is in this sense that it forms a panorama which absolutely shuts in every one of us into his own circle of ideas. (It is not implied, we should carefully observe, that his ideas or experience are in any way secondary to his self, or separable from it, or an adjective of it.) Then how does it happen that our separate worlds, the panoramas which we construct, do not contradict one another?

The answer is, that they correspond. It is this conception from which we must start in Logic. We must learn to regard our separate worlds of knowledge; as something constructed by definite processes, and corresponding to each other in consequence of the common nature of these processes. We know that we begin apart. We begin in fact, though not conscious of our limits, with feelings and fancies and unorganised experiences which give us little or no {18} common ground and power of co-operation with other people. But as the constructive process advances, the correspondence between our worlds is widened and deepened, and the greater proportion of what we are obliged to think is in harmony with what other people are obliged to think. Now of course this would not be so unless reality, the whole actual system in which we find ourselves, were self-consistent. But more than that, it would not be so unless the nature of intelligence were the same in every mind. It is this common nature of intelligence, together with its differentiated adaptations to reality, that we have to deal with in Logic.

Thus the separate worlds, in which we are all shut up, must be considered as corresponding so far as they are objective, that is, so far as they approach what we are ultimately obliged to think. I say “corresponding,” because that is the term which expresses the relation between systems which represent the same thing by the same rules, but with different starting-points. Drawings in perspective of the same building from different points of view are such corresponding systems; the parts represented answer each to each, but the same part is near or large in one drawing, and distant and small in another; not, however, by chance, but as a definite consequence of the same laws. Our separate worlds may be compared to such drawings: the things in them are identified by their relations and functions, so that we can understand each other, i.e. make identical references, though my drawing be taken from the east, and yours from the west. The things do not look quite the same in our different worlds; besides being taken from different standpoints, both drawings are imperfect and incorrect. But so {19} long as we can make out the correspondence, we have a basis for co-operation and for discussion. Logic shows us the principles and processes by which, under the given influences, these drawings are constructed.

Subjective Idealism

8. If we merely hold to the doctrine of separate worlds, without insisting upon their correspondence with each other and with reality, we fall back into the position of subjective idealism, which is a natural completion of common-sense theory, when, instead of turning round to retrace its path, it runs deeper into the cul-de-sac. It is a very obvious reflection, that each of us is shut up within his own mind, and much easier to grasp than the reason for assuming a real system which appears differently, though correspondingly, in the centres of consciousness which are ourselves. We cannot get at anything but in terms of consciousness; how can we justify the assumption that our consciousness of a world of objects is rooted in reality, e.g., that objects may rightly be treated as persisting and inter-acting when our personal consciousness is withdrawn? And if we once doubt this, then why should we assume that our ideas need be or tend to be consistent with themselves and each other, as for the time they apparently are?

Subjective Idealism necessarily arises if the common-sense theory of two worlds, the real outside the mind, and the ideal, copying it, within the mind, is pushed to its conclusion. The real, outside the mind, being inaccessible, falls away. The arguments of this Idealism, as Hume said, “admit of no answer and produce no conviction.” [1] But I {20} mention the idea, because I do not think that any one can really understand the problem of Logic, or indeed of science in general, without having thoroughly thought himself into the difficulty of Subjective Idealism. It is necessary to be wholly dissatisfied with common-sense theory, and with the notion of a ready-made world set up for us to copy in the mind, before the logical analysis of intellectual construction can have interest or meaning for us. And to produce this dissatisfaction is the value of Subjective Idealism.

[1] Vol. iv. p. 176 (ed. of 1854), Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, sect. 12.

{21}

LECTURE II “JUDGMENT” AS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF A WORLD

Defect of Subjective Idealism

1. The last lecture was devoted to explaining the distinction between the stream of presentations and the world as it is for knowledge. I ended by calling attention to the theory known as “Subjective Idealism.” This, I said, has the merit of forcing upon us the question, “How do we get from mind to reality? How do we get from subjective to objective?” For we have always to remember that our knowledge is within consciousness, though it may refer outside it.

On the other hand, Subjective Idealism has the defect of confounding the very distinction which we took so much trouble to make plain. Its essence lies in ascribing to the world of knowledge properties which are only true of the stream of presentation. It is quite true that the actual presentations of this room, which each of us has in his head at this moment, are all different from each other, and different from any which we have had before, and shall ever have again. Every minute, every second, they differ; they are perishing existences, wholly mental, and each of them when past is irrecoverably gone. That is the property of a presentation within the course of consciousness. It is a particular perishing existence.

{22} But Subjective Idealism says, “Because these mental existences are particular perishing existences, and all knowledge consists in them as its medium, therefore the object of knowledge is nothing beyond these mental facts, and is not rooted in a permanent system [1] independent of our mental connections.” Here we must check the inference, and reply, “No, it does not follow. The presentations which themselves come and go may refer to something in common, and through them all we may become aware of something that is not wholly in any of them.” In other words, there is in Knowledge no passage from subjective to objective, but only a development of the objective.

[1] Our estimate of Berkeley’s view must depend on the degree in which we judge him to have identified the Deity with, or separated Him from, a permanent and universal system. The statement in the text applies fairly to Hume.

The world as Knowledge

2. Therefore we say, coming closer to our subject, that “Knowledge is the medium in which our world, as an interrelated whole, [1] exists for us.” This is more than saying that it exists in mind or presentation, because the mere course of consciousness need not amount to Knowledge. A world, that is, a system of things acting on one another, could not exist merely in the course of our ideas. But Knowledge, we said, is the mental construction of reality. It consists of what we are obliged to assert in thought, and because we are all obliged to think assertorily according to the same methods, the results of our thinking form corresponding systems—systems that correspond alike to each other and to reality. (I may be asked, does not this agreement of {23} our knowledge depend on the agreement of the physical stimuli supplied to us by nature, as well as on the homogeneousness of our intelligences? The answer is, that these stimuli, or nature, have no priority in Knowledge. Their identity is merely a case or consequence of the identity of our experience as a whole. We are regarding nature as a system developed in experience, not as an unknown somewhat behind it. To suppose that solid or extended existence somehow comes before and accounts for everything else, is a form of the common-sense theory we have dismissed. Knowledge and Truth have their limitations as forms of Reality, but an appeal to solidity or extension will not furnish the required supplementation.)

[1] The words italicised make a reservation in favour of feeling, which has its own form of reality, but is not relational.

Knowledge is in the form of Judgement

3. All that we have been saying about Knowledge is summed up in the sentence, “Knowledge is a judgment, an affirmation.” We need not trouble ourselves yet about negation. We all know what affirmative assertion is, and it is near enough for the present to say that all knowledge is judgment in the sense of affirmative assertion.

I will explain how we sum up all we have said of knowledge by calling it a judgment.

Judgment or affirmation always implies three properties, though they are not always recognised.

It is (a) necessary, (b) universal, and (c) constructive.

Judgment necessary

(a) Judgment is necessary. In saying this, we express all that we said about the objectivity of the world in knowledge. “Objective” meant, we concluded, what we are obliged to think. And judgment is necessary, because it expresses what we are obliged to think; obliged, that is, not as we are obliged to feel pain, as an unexplained and {24} isolated fact, but obliged by a necessity operative within the movement of our consciousness, though not, of course, theoretically recognised as necessity in common thinking. Thus, in the simplest phases of Judgment, necessity does begin to approach the kind of necessity by which we feel pain or are visited by persistent irrational associations.

We can trace an explicit sense of necessity in any scientific matter, or in any doubtful and complex matters in which we are aware of our own reflections. We constantly hear and read such phrases as, “I am unable to resist the conclusion”; “I am forced to believe”; “I am driven to think”; “I have no alternative but to suppose.” These are every-day phrases in controversy and in theoretical discussion. And what they all mean is just what was insisted on in the last lecture; the objective or real for us is what we are obliged to think. Given our perceptive state and our mental equipment, the judgment follows.

In trivial or simple judgments this necessity is harder to observe within consciousness, and approaches more and more to the mere constraint exercised upon us by physical reality. In a judgment of mere sensuous comparison, such as a “colour-match,” the necessity is not that of an intellectual system, but almost that of a feeling which we cannot dispel. The chief intellectual labour is here negative, and consists in precautions to remove all disturbing influences, both mental and material, so as to let the perception operate freely on the mind. But yet here is necessity; we never for a moment think that we can modify the result; our aim is simply to distinguish from all others the particular strand of necessity by which we desire to be guided.

{25} It is easy for an observer to detect intellectual necessity in judgment, even where the judging subject is wholly unreflective. If you contradict an obvious judgment made by an uneducated man, he will no doubt be quite unable to point out the intellectual necessity which constrains him to it, i.e. to argue in support of it; but he will be bewildered and probably indignant, which shows that, unknown to himself, his whole intellectual existence is really impeached by impeachment of a necessary conclusion from it. Many people cannot see the difference between impeaching their argument and impeaching their veracity; and this confusion arises, I presume, from a just feeling that their whole mind is on its trial in the one case as in the other, although they do not distinguish between the forms of its action which are concerned. We are told, indeed, in formal logic, that ordinary statements of fact do not claim necessity; but this merely arises from confining necessity to explicit necessity expressed in a special grammatical form.

But, it may be objected, we do not always feel that every trivial judgment emanates from and so implicates our whole mental constitution and equipment. If I say to a friend, “I saw you at Charing Cross yesterday,” and he says, “No, you could not, for I was out of town,” then, unless I was very certain indeed, I should admit having made a mistake, and think no more about the matter. That only means, (1) that the unity of the mind is not thoroughly complete—there are many more or less detached systems in the mind, and one of them may not be very deeply inwrought in the whole intellectual frame; and (2) the necessity of thought may itself modify the certainty of the fact, e.g. I know that {26} a mistake of identity is quite a common thing, and this knowledge co-operates with my friend’s denial.

But in any perceptive judgment, however unimportant its immediate content, if it is clear and persistent, a contradiction is a most serious thing. There is a well-known form of bewilderment connected with the judgment of direction; if you forget or do not know of a turn that you have taken, and come out, for example, on familiar ground from the North when you think you are coming on it from the South, so that objects have the reverse position of what you expected, then, supposing that you cannot explain the contradiction, the result is sometimes a very grave perplexity; some men are quite unhinged by it for the moment, and a psychologist in France [1] has given it a new name, “Vertigo of Direction.” This again shows how your whole intellectual nature is staked upon the most trifling perception, and if you seem to be forced to a flat contradiction even in the simplest judgment you are almost “beside yourself.”

[1] M. Binet. See Mind, x. 156.

Judgment universal

(b) Judgment is universal. There are different senses of “universal” as of “necessary.” We are now speaking only in the widest sense, in which universality is a property of all judgment whatever. If we assume that all our intellectual natures are the same, then to be universal is a mere consequence of being necessary. I not only feel that my judgment is inevitable for me, but I never think of doubting that, given the same materials, it is obligatory for every other intelligent being. If some one disagrees with a judgment of mine, I try to put the case before him as it is in my mind. And I am absolutely sure that if I could do so, he {27} would be obliged to judge as I do. If it were not so, we should never think of arguing. We should simply say, “Perhaps his mind is differently constituted from mine,” as, in fact, with reference to special sets of dominant ideas, and to special provinces of experience, we often do say. But these we regard as hindrances, imperfections, accidents. We do not doubt that the system of reason is active in him as in us.

And thus, as reason is essentially a system, the universality of judgment involves something more. We not only think that our judgment is obligatory upon every one else, in as far as they have the same materials, but we think that it must be consistent with the judgments of all other persons, just as much as with our own. If it is inconsistent with any other judgment, we think that one of the two must be wrong; that is, we will not admit the possibility that the real world, as others construct it, is out of harmony with the real world as we construct it.

Thus knowledge, being judgment, is necessary and universal, and in the widest sense this is true of all judgments.

Judgment is constructive

(c) These are two properties of the Judgment, but they do not tell us what it is. We shall of course examine its nature more fully in the later lectures. At present we need only think of it as affirmation. This may be simply described as “pronouncing the interpretation of our perceptions to form one system with the data of our perceptions.” We may at once admit the distinction between data and interpretation to be only relative. Its relativity is the consequence of the constructed or so to speak artificial {28} character of our real world. We can get at no data unqualified by judgment.

We may take as an example our perception of things in space. How much of what we see is given in present sense-perception? This is a question to which there is no definite answer. We do not know what the presentations of vision were like before we had learnt to see as a fully conscious human being sees. We have no right to assume, that after we have learned to see in this way the actual sense-presentation remains the same as it was in a different stage of our visual education. We can give no precise meaning in the way of a time-limit to the presentness of perception. But we know this much, that it takes a long time and many kinds of experience to learn to see as an educated human being sees, and that this acquired capacity is never at a stand-still, but is always being extended or diminished according to the vitality, growth, or atrophy of our apperceptive masses. There is always a certain element of amplification or interpretation, which by experience, or attentive introspection we can eliminate from the data, apparently forced upon us by reality, although these data themselves are modified through and through both by habitual interpretation, and by the very defining attention which aims at eliminating all amplification from them.

But yet the whole of sense-perception has a peculiar quality in being present. Artificial though it is, it yet, relatively speaking, contains an irreducible datum. It is distinguishable from everything which is not present. It is pervaded by something which we cannot reduce to {29} intellectual relation, though if we withdrew from it all that is relation, the apparent datum would be gone.

Now Knowledge is the affirmation or judgment which identifies the constructive interpretation of our present perception with the reality which present perception forces upon us. This is clear enough to begin with, but will have to be modified below to suit the more circuitous or mediate types of Judgment.

I take two examples, one from sight and one from sound.

Here is a table. In common language we should all say, “We see that is a table.” The expression is quite correct, because human seeing is a judgment. But yet, if you were asked to reduce your perception to terms of sight pure and simple—I mean of visual sensation—why, unless you were an analytic psychologist or a very skilful artist, you would not be able to do it. To speak of one point only, you would have to eliminate the attribute of depth and distance. That is all, so far as mere vision is concerned, your theory and your interpretation. The problem for an artist is to get back, at his high plane of perceptive power, to what in theory would be the lower plane. He has to re-translate his perception of a thing in space into a flat coloured surface. The difference between his flat picture and a real object in space is a rough measure of the difference made by interpretation or implication in the datum of sense-perception when we say, judging by sight only, “That is a table.” All the experiences of touch and motion, from which we have learned to perceive the solidity of the object, are, theoretically speaking, put into the judgment by us. They are not given by the eye alone, although we cannot now {30} separate them from that which is given by the eye alone. For the artist’s flat picture, which I used as an illustration, is not a stage in our visual education. Our visual education has proceeded pari passu with our education by touch and motion; and we saw objects in space as solids, long before we reflected that for the eye alone a coloured surface would naturally appear as flat. [1]

[1] The view that depth is a visual datum in the same sense as breadth seems to me in flagrant contradiction with experience. But for our present purpose the question is only one of degree, as no one maintains, that either depth or breadth are seen without education as an adult sees them.

But this impossibility of getting at an original datum only shows how entirely we are right in saying that our world is constructed by judgment. For the process of interpretative amplification passes quite continuously from the unconscious to the conscious; and every definitely expressed judgment, though perfectly homogeneous with the processes which have qualified its datum, and though it may fall wholly within the maximum of what in ordinary parlance we should call a simple given perception, contains an identification of some ideal element, enlargement, or interpretation, with that relatively given element which reveals itself through a peculiar quality of presentness pervading the “given” perception.

In the example “That is a table,” the unity of judgment is so well shown that the identification becomes almost unreal. In fact, we never judge except to satisfy an interest and so simple a judgment used as an example, apart from any context which could explain the need for it, has an air of unreality. You may hear a child make such a judgment {31} constantly in the sheer pleasure of recognition. An adult would never make it explicitly unless in some particular context; but it is made, as I shall maintain below, by the mere glance of his eye which takes in the table as a real object in a real world of space. Its appearance to the eye is in this case the datum, while the interpretation consists in construing this appearance as a solid individual existence in space.

We will look at an example in which the discrimination of elements is easier. Take the affirmation, “That is a cab,” assuming it to be made from merely hearing a sound. In this we can much more nearly separate the datum or minimum of sense from our enlargement or interpretation of it, and we know that our interpretation is liable to be wrong; that is to say, the reality into which we ought to construe the sound may be some other kind of vehicle, and not a cab. Now compare this with the affirmation, “That (which I see) is a cab.” This judgment of sight-perception, though its terms are more inextricably interwoven, has just the same elements in it as the judgment of sound-perception, “That (which I hear) is a cab.” In the sound-perception the structure is quite plain. A particular complex quality in the sound suggests as its objective explanation, what is perfectly distinguishable from it in thought, the movement of a cab on a particular kind of pavement. The quality of the sound, its roughness, loudness, increase and decrease, all form points of connection with the sound of a cab as we know it, and with the speed, weight, etc. of such a vehicle. But it is quite easy to consider the sound in itself apart from its interpretation, and we sometimes feel the {32} interpretation to be more immediate, and sometimes more inferential. We sometimes say, “I hear a cab,” just as we say, “I see one,” but in case of sound we more often perhaps say, “That sounds like—” such and such a thing, which indicates a doubt, and the beginning of conscious inference.

Thus we see how continuous is the mental construction of reality. From our unreflective education in seeing, hearing, and touching, to the explicit judgment of the trained observer, which in its turn passes readily into inference, there is no definite break. Once the idea of reality, or of a world, is applied in practice (I do not say reflectively grasped), there is no further difficulty in principle throughout the whole process of its construction.

We may then sum up so far: our knowledge, or our world in knowledge, exists for us as a judgment, that is, as an affirmation in which our present perception is amplified by an ideal interpretation which is identified with it. This interpretation or enlargement claims necessity or universality, and is therefore objective as our world, i.e. is what we are obliged to think, and what we are all obliged to think. The whole system in process of construction, viz. our present perception as extended by interpretation, is what we mean by reality, only with a reservation in favour of forms of experience which are not intellectual at all. Every judgment then affirms something to be real, and therefore affirms reality to be defined, in part, by that something. Knowledge exists in the form of affirmations about reality. And our world as existing for us in the medium of knowledge consists, for us, of a standing affirmation about reality.

{33} Continuous affirmation of waking consciousness

4. This standing affirmation about reality may be described in other words as “the continuous affirmative judgment of the waking consciousness.” In the common logic-books you will find judgment treated only as the “proposition,” that is, as an assertion made in language. That is a very convenient way of treating the judgment, and is not false, if you remember that the proposition, that is, the assertory sentence, is rather a translation of the judgment than the judgment itself. But the judgment expressed in a proposition is always some one definite assertion, with a limited subject and predicate. We shall speak of the judgment in this sense—the usual sense—later. But to-day I want to describe the judgment in a more extended sense, that is, as co-extensive with the waking human consciousness, so far as aware of a world.

If Judgment consists in the extension of our perceptions by an interpretation considered as equally real with their content, it clearly is not confined to the particular facts and truths which from time to time we utter in language. And more than this, everything that we do definitely utter, implies a great deal which is not definitely uttered. If I say, “I have to catch the train at Sloane Square to go down to Essex Hall,” I only mention the reality of one train, one square, and one building. But my assertion shades off into innumerable facts, the equal reality of which as elements in my world is necessary to make this judgment intelligible and true. It implies the real existence of the underground railway, which implies that of London, and therefore that of the surface of our globe in a certain definite order, and of the civilised world. It implies the reality of this building and of the meetings which we hold in it, of the University {34} Extension system, and of my own life and habits as enabling me to take part in the work of that system. Only a part of this is in the focus of my attention as I judge; but the whole is a continuous context, the parts of which are inseparable; and although I do not affirm the whole of it in so many words, when I say that I am coming down here by train this evening, yet if any part of it was not affirmed the rest would, so to speak, fall to pieces, i.e. would lose relations in the absence of which its meaning would be destroyed. Other detached parts of one’s life and knowledge may seem to be separable from the content of such a judgment; but on looking closely we see that this is not the case. So long as we are awake, our whole world is conceived as real, and forms for us a single immense affirmation, which hangs from present perception, and shares its constraining power. My present perception is the illuminated spot, and shades off gradually into the rest which forms the background, receiving from this background its organised systematic individuality, while impressing upon it a relation to its own sensuous presentness. We have only to reflect, in order to illustrate this connection, on the way in which the idea of London forms a determining background for the present perception of this room, while on the other hand it is perceived by us as real in our presentation of this room.

And indeed the simplest example of what I am pointing out is the arrangement of objects and places in space. The visual picture which each of us forms of this room is certainly an affirmative judgment. It is a judgment because it consists of ideas affirmed as true of reality. As we look round, all the distances of the objects and the walls from {35} each other, and their shapes and position, seem to be imprinted on our minds without an effort. But really they are conclusions from long education in the art of seeing and from the experience of the other senses. They are an enlargement or interpretation of sense-perception, taken as real, i.e. as forming a system which is one with the content of sense-perception, and touches us through sense-perception, and therefore they exist for us in the form of Judgment. And, as I described before, our whole world, both of things in space and of our own history and circumstances, is also affirmed as the background implied in this picture. That is to say, it is all connected together, it is all taken as equally real, and it is all vouched for by its connection with what is given to us in perception. What do we mean by saying that the Antipodes are real, and implied in my perception of this room? We mean that they are an element, necessary to educated thought, in the same system with which I am in contact at this moment by sight, touch, and hearing, the system of reality. And though I may not have explicitly thoughts of them since entering the room till now, yet, if they were no part of my affirmed system of ideas, my perception of anything in space would be quite different from what it is.

This sense of necessary connection is confined, I think, to our waking consciousness. Of course there are degrees between waking and dreaming; but I should be inclined to set up the presence or absence of judgment as a very fair test of those degrees. We say that a man is awake in as far as he is aware (i) of a reality which is not his mere course of consciousness, and (ii.) of the same reality of which other {36} people are aware; i.e. in as far as he identifies his present perception with a reality, and that the real reality. It is said that surprise, i.e. the sense of conflict between expectation and the reality, is absent In dreams, and in a very remarkable passage Aeschylus identifies the life of the savage in his (imaginary) primitive state with a dream-life, considered as a life of sensuous presentation, in which the interpretative judgment of perception was absent. With extraordinary profoundness, in portraying this all but animal existence, he strikes out all those relations to the objective world by which man forms for himself a system that goes beyond the present, so as to leave the stream of presentation without any background of organised reality. [1]

[1] I quote from Mrs. Browning’s Translation of the Prometheus Bound, which seems close enough for the present purpose.

“And let me tell you, not as taunting men,
But teaching you the intention of my gifts,
How first, beholding, they beheld in vain.
And hearing, heard not, but, like shapes in dreams,
Mixed all things wildly down the tedious time,
Nor knew to build a house against the sun
With wicketed sides, nor any woodwork knew,
But lived, like silly ants, beneath the ground,
In hollow caves unsunned. There came to them
No steadfast sign of winter, nor of spring
Flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of fruit.
But blindly and lawlessly they did all things,
Until I taught them how the stars do rise
And set in mystery, and devised for them
Number, the inducer of philosophies.
The synthesis of letters, and besides,
The artificer of all things, Memory,
That sweet muse-mother.” Pr., v. 445, ff.

The expression “seeing saw not, and hearing heard not” appears to suggest the contrast of presentation and objective perception.

{37} It may be asked, “Why should not a man form for himself a system which interprets his own perception, but is discrepant from the system of every one else? Should we in that case count him as awake?” Yes, he would be awake, but he would be mad. Suppose, being a common man, he interprets all his perceptions into a system which makes him out to be King of England; in such a case he cannot be set down as dreaming, because he is alleging a connection which goes beyond his present perception, and has, ostensibly, been propounded as an interpretation of it into a systematic order of things. He has in short a world, but he has broken away from the world, and therefore we pronounce him mad. A completely new vision of life may cause a man to be thought mad. [1]

[1] See Browning’s Epistle of Karshish.

The whole world, then, of our waking [1] consciousness may be treated as a single connected predicate affirmed as an enlargement of present perception. All that we take to be real is by the mere fact of being so taken, brought within an affirmative judgment.

[1] I do not mean to say that judgment and consciousness of a world can be wholly absent in dreams, and often no doubt they are distinctly present. But in those dreams, in my own experience the normal ones, which leave behind a mere impression that unrecognisable images have passed before the mind, judgment and the sense of reality must surely have all but disappeared. I am inclined to think that dreams are very much rationalised in recollection and description.

Comparison with world as Will

5. To further illustrate the relation of what, in our permanent judgment, is distinctly thought, what is dimly thought, and what is implied, let us look for a moment at what we may call “the world as will.” This is not the doctrine of Schopenhauer in his work, The World as Will and Idea, {38} although the two conceptions have something in common. His is a metaphysical doctrine, in which he says that the fundamental reality of the Universe must be conceived as Will. We have nothing to do with that. We are speaking merely of what the world is for us, and for us it is not only a system of reality but a system of purposes. Our world of will is a permanent factor of our waking consciousness, just as much as our world of knowledge. Now our will is made up of a great number of purposes, more or less connected together, just as our knowledge is made up of a great number of provinces and regions more or less connected together. And just as in our knowledge at any moment much is clear, much is dim, much is implied, and the whole forms a continuous context, so it is with our purposes.

When, for example, one stands looking at a picture, one’s immediate conscious purpose is to study the picture. One also entertains dimly or by force of habit the purpose to remain standing, which is a curious though common instance of will. We do not attend to the purpose of walking or standing, yet we only walk or stand (in normal conditions of mind) as long as we will to do so. If we go to sleep or faint, we shall fall down. Purpose, like judgment, is confined to the waking consciousness.

But further; the purpose which one entertains in standing to look at a picture is not really an isolated pin-point of will. It is uppermost in the mind at the moment in which we carry it out, but it is only the uppermost stratum, or perhaps rather the present point attained upon a definite road, within an intricate formation or network of purposes, which taken together constitute the world of will. The purpose of looking {39} at a picture shades off into the more general purpose of learning to take pleasure in what is good of its kind, which is again set in a certain place within the conception of our life and the way in which we desire to spend it, and our purposes throughout every particular day are fitted into one another, and give a particular setting and colour to each other, and to each particular day, and week, and year.

Now less or more of all this may be clearly in the mind when we are carrying out a particular momentary aim. But it is quite certain that in a human life the particular momentary aim derives its significance from this background of other purposes; and, if they were to fall away, the distinct momentary purpose would change its character and become quite a feeble and empty thing.

Thus we have, in our world of will, a parallel case which illustrates the nature of our world of knowledge. There is the clear will to look at the picture, the dim will to continue standing, and the implied will to carry out certain general aims, and follow a certain routine or course of life, which gives the momentary purpose its entire setting and background.

I have spoken of the will in order to illustrate the judgment, because the dim and implied elements are perhaps more easy to observe in the case of the will. Almost all our common waking life is carried on by actions such as walking and sitting, which we hardly know that we will, but which we could not do if we did not will them. And also the greater part of our life is rather within a sphere of will which has become objective for us in our profession, interests, and ideals, than a perpetual active choice between {40} alternatives such as brings the act of volition before us in the most striking way. Just so it is with judgment. Our speaking and writing is a very small part of our judging, just as our conscious choice between alternatives [1] is a very small part of our willing.

[1] I do not for a moment suggest that our “conscious choice” is ultimately different in kind from our habitual persistence in a course of life. I only take it as an instance in which we fully attend to our volition.

Distribution of Attention

6. Thus the world of knowledge and the world of will must each of them be regarded as a continuum for the waking consciousness. Whenever we are awake, we are judging; whenever we are awake we are willing. The distribution of attention in these two worlds is very closely analogous. In both, it is impossible to attend to our whole world at the same moment. But in both, our world is taken as being a single connected system; and therefore (i.) attention shades off gradually from the momentary focus of illumination into less and less intensity over the other parts of the continuous judgment or purpose; but (ii.) that which is in the focus of attention depends for its quality upon that which is less distinctly or not at all in the focus of attention. And as attention diminishes in intensity, the implication of reality does not diminish with it. In other words, in spite of the inequality of attention, the reality of our whole world is implied in the reality of which at any moment we are distinctly aware. But being distinctly aware of reality is another name for judgment.

Now the common logical judgments which we shall have to analyse and classify are simply those parts of this continuous affirmation of consciousness which are from time {41} to time separately made distinct. Each of them therefore must be regarded as a partial expression of the nature of reality, and the subject will always be Reality in one form, and the predicate reality in another form. The ultimate and complete judgment would be the whole of Reality predicated of itself. All our logical judgments are such portions and fragments of this judgment as we can grasp at the moment. Some of these gather up in a system whole provinces of reality, others merely enlarge, interpret, or analyse the content of a very simple sense-perception. We shall not go far wrong in practice if we start from this judgment of Perception as the fundamental kind of Judgment. The real subject in Judgment is always Reality in some particular datum or qualification, and the tendency of Judgment is always to be a definition of Reality. We see the parts of Judgment most clearly in such thoughts as “This is blue”; “This is a flower”; “That light is the rising sun”; “That sound is the surf on a sandy shore.” In these we can plainly distinguish the element of presentation and the interpretative construction or analytic synthesis which is by the judgment identified with it.

{42}

LECTURE III THE RELATION OF LOGIC TO KNOWLEDGE

Meaning of “Form”

1. I spoke of the whole world, which we take to be real, as presented to us in the shape of a continuous judgment. It is the task of Logic to analyse the structure of this Judgment, the parts of which are Judgments.

The first thing is then to consider what sort of properties of Judgments we attend to in Logic. It is commonly said that Logic is a formal science; that is, that it deals with the form, and not with the content or matter of knowledge.

This word “form” is always meeting us in philosophy. “Species” is Latin for form, as εἶδος and ἰδεα [1] are Greek for form. The form of any object primarily means its appearance, that which the mind can carry away, while the object as a physical reality, as material, remains where it was. It need not mean shape as opposed to colour; that is a narrower usage. The Greek opinion was no doubt rooted in some such notion as that in knowing or remembering a thing the mind possessed its form or image without its matter. Thus the form came to stand for the knowable shape or structure which makes a thing what it is, and by which we recognise it when we see it. This was its species or its idea, the “image,” as it is used in the phrase, “Let us make man in our own image.” So in any work of the hands {43} of man, the form was the shape given by the workman, and came out of his mind, while the matter was the stuff or material out of which the thing was made.

[1] [= “eidos” and “idea”. Tr.]

The moment we contemplate a classification of the sciences, we see that this is a purely relative distinction. There is no matter without form. If it was in this deep sense without form, it would be without properties, and so incapable of acting or being acted upon. In a knife the matter is steel, the form is the shape of the blade. But the qualities of steel again depend, we must suppose, upon a certain character and arrangement in its particles, and this is, as Bacon would have called it, the form of steel. But taken as purely relative, the distinction is good prima facie. Steel has its own form, but the knife has its form, and the matter steel can take many other forms besides that of a knife. Marble has its own form, its definable properties as marble (chemical and mechanical), but in a statue, marble is the matter, and the form is the shape given by the sculptor.

Now applying this distinction to knowledge in general, we see that all science is formal, and therefore it is no distinction to say that Logic is a formal science. Geometry is a formal science; even molecular physics is a formal science. All science is formal, because all science consists in tracing out the universal characteristics of things, the structure that makes them what they are.

The particular “form,” then, with which a science deals is simply the kind of properties that come under the point of view from which that science in particular looks at things. But a very general science is more emphatically formal than {44} a very special science. That is to say, it deals with properties which are presented in some degree by everything; and so in every object a great multitude of properties are disregarded by it, are treated by it as matter and not as form. In this sense Logic is emphatically “formal,” though not nearly so formal as it is often supposed to be. The subject-matter of Logic, then, is Knowledge qua Knowledge, or the form of knowledge; that is, the properties which are possessed by objects or ideas in so far as they are members of the world of knowledge. And it is quite essential to distinguish the form of knowledge in this sense from its matter or content. The “matter” of knowledge is the whole region of facts dealt with by science and perception. If Logic dealt with this in the way in which knowledge deals with it, i.e. simply as a process of acquiring and organising experience, then Logic would simply be another name for the whole range of science, history, and perception. Then there would be no distinction between logic and science or common sense, and in trying to ascertain, say, the wave-length of red light, or the cab-fare from Chelsea to Essex Hall, we should be investigating a logical problem. But we see at once that this is not what we mean by studying knowledge as knowledge. Science or common sense aims at a particular answer to each problem of this kind. Logic aims at understanding the type and principles both of the problem and of its answer. The details of the particular answer are the “matter of fact.” The type and principles which are found in all such particular answers may be regarded as the form of fact, i.e. that which makes the fact a fact in knowledge.

Jevons appears to me to make a terrible blunder at this {45} point. He says [1]—“One name which has been given to Logic, namely the Science of Sciences, very aptly describes the all-extensive power of logical principles. The cultivators of special branches of knowledge appear to have been fully aware of the allegiance they owe to the highest of the sciences, for they have usually given names implying this allegiance. The very name of Logic occurs as part of nearly all the names adopted for the sciences, which are often vulgarly called the ‘ologies,’ but are really the ‘logics,’ the ‘o’ being only a connecting vowel or part of the previous word. Thus geology is logic applied to explain the formation of the earth’s crust; biology is logic applied to the phenomena of life; psychology is logic applied to the nature of the mind; and the same is the case with physiology, entomology, zoology, teratology, morphology, anthropology, theology, ecclesiology, thalattology, and the rest. Each science is thus distinctly confessed to be a special logic. The name of Logic itself is derived from the common Greek word λόγος, which usually means word, or the sign and outward manifestation of any inward thought. But the same word was also used to denote the inward thought or reasoning of which words are the expression, and it is thus probably that later Greek writers on reasoning were led to call their science ἐπιστήμη λογική, or logical science, also τέχνη λογική or logical art. [2] The adjective λογική, being used alone, soon came to be the name of the science, just as Mathematic, Rhetoric, and other names ending in ‘ic’ were originally adjectives, but have been converted into substantives.”

[1] Elementary Lessons, p. 6.

[2] [= “logos”, “episteme logike”, “techne logike” and “logike”. Tr.]

{46} This account of the connection between the name “Logic” and the terminations of the names of the sciences appears precisely wrong. Whatever may have been the exact meaning of the expression “Logic,” or “Logical curriculum,” [1] or “art,” or “science” when first employed, there can be no doubt that the word logical had a substantive reference to that about which the science or teaching in question was to treat. The term “logic,” therefore, corresponds not to the syllables “logy” in such a word as “Zoology,” but to the syllables “Zoo,” which indicate the province of the special science, and not its character as a science. Zoology means connected discourse (λόγος) about living creatures. Logic meant a curriculum, or science or art dealing with connected discourse. The phrase “Science of Sciences,” rightly interpreted, has the same meaning. It does not mean that Logic is a Science which comprises all the special sciences, but that Logic is a Science dealing with those general properties and relations which all sciences qua sciences have in common, but omitting, as from its point of view matter and not form, the particular details of content by which every science answers the particular questions which it asks. It is wild, and most mischievous, to say that “every science is a special logic,” or that “biology is Logic applied to the phenomena of life.” This confusion destroys the whole disinterestedness which is necessary to true scientific Logic, and causes the logical student always to have his eye on puzzles, and special methods, and interferences by which he may teach the student of science how to perform the concrete labour of research. We quite admit that {47} a looker-on may sometimes see more of the game, and no wise investigator would contemn a priori the suggestions of a student like Goethe, or Mill, or Lotze, because their author was not exclusively engaged in the observation of nature. But all this is secondary. The idea that Logic is a judge of scientific results, able to pass sentence, in virtue of some general criterion, upon their validity and invalidity, arises from a deep-lying misconception of the nature of truth which naturally allies itself with the above confusion between Logic and the special sciences.

[1] πραγμάτεια [= pragmateia Tr.]. See Prantl, i. 545.

Therefore the relation between content or matter of knowledge, and the form which is its general characteristic as knowledge, is of this kind. We can either study the objects of knowledge directly as we perceive them, or indirectly, as examples of the way in which we know. As studied for their own sake, they are regarded as the matter or content in which the general form of knowledge finds individual realisation. In botany, for instance, we have a large number of actual plants classified and explained in their relation to one another. A botanist is interested directly in the affinities and evolution of these plants, and in the principles of biology which underlie their history. He pushes his researches further and further into the individual matters that come to light, without, as a rule, more than a passing reflection upon the abstract nature of the methods which he is creating as his work proceeds. He classifies, explains, observes, experiments, theorises, generalises, to the best of his power, solely in order to grasp and render intelligible the region of concrete fact that lies before him. Now while his particular results and discoveries {48} constitute the “form” or knowable properties of the plant-world as the object of botanical science, the science which inquires into the general nature of knowledge must treat these particular results as “mere matter”—as something with which it is not directly concerned, any more than the art which makes a statue is primarily and directly concerned with the chemical and mechanical properties of marble. The “form” or knowable properties with which the general science of knowledge is directly concerned, consists in those methods and processes which the man of science, developing the modes in which common sense naturally works, constructs unconsciously as he goes along. Thus, not the nature and affinities of the plant-world, but classification, explanation, observation, experiment, theory, are the phenomena in virtue of which the organised structure of botanical science participates in the form of knowledge, and its objects become, in these respects, objects of logical theory.

Hence some properties and relations of objects, being the form or knowable structure of the concrete objects as a special department of nature, correspond to the mere matter, stuff, or content of Knowledge in general, while other properties and relations of objects, being their form or knowable structure as entering into a world of reality displayed to our intelligence, correspond to the form of Knowledge as treated of by a general inquiry into its characteristics, which we call Logic. It is just as the qualities or “forms” of the different metals of which knives can be made are mere matter or irrelevant detail when we are discussing the general “form” or quality of a good knife, {49} whatever its material. A reservation on this head appears in the following section.

Form of Knowledge dependent on Content

2. For the form of Knowledge depends in some degree upon its matter. It is very important to realise this truth; for if Logic is swamped by being identified with the whole range of special sciences, it is killed by being emptied of all adaptation to living intelligence. What is called Formal Logic par excellence in all its shapes, whether antiquated as in Hamilton’s or Thomson’s Formal Laws of Thought, or freshly worked out on a symbolic basis as by Boole and others, has, it appears to me, this initial defect, when considered as a general theory of Logic. As a contribution to such a theory, every method which will work undoubtedly has its place, and indicates and depends upon some characteristic of real thought. But in the central theory itself, and especially in so short an account of it as must be attempted in these lectures, I should be inclined to condemn all attempts to employ symbols for anything more than the most passing illustration of points in logical processes. All such attempts, I must maintain, share with the old-fashioned laws of Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded Middle the initial fallacy of representing a judgment by something which is not and cannot be in any way an adequate symbol of one. If, in order to get at the pure form of Knowledge, we restrict ourselves to very abstract characteristics in which all knowledge appears, very roughly speaking, to agree, and which can be symbolized for working purposes by combinations of signs which have not the essential properties of ideal contents, then we have ab initio substituted for the judgment something which is a very {50} abstract corollary from the nature of judgment, and may or not for certain purposes and within certain limits be a fair representative of it. We cannot and must not exclude from the form of Knowledge its modifications according to “matter,” and its nature as existing only in “matter.”

In fact, the peculiar “form” of everything depends in some degree on its “matter.” A statue in marble is a little differently treated if it is copied in bronze. A knife is properly made of steel; you can only make a bad one of iron, or copper, or flint, and you cannot make one at all of wax. Different matters will more or less take the same form, but only within certain limits. So it is in Knowledge. The nature of objects as Knowledge—for we must remember that “form” in our sense is not something put into the “matter,” something alien or indifferent to it, but is simply its own inmost character revealed by the structural relations in which it is found capable of standing [1]—depends on the way in which their parts are connected together.

[1] The example of the marble statue may seem to contradict this idea; and no doubt the indifference of matter to form is a question of degree. But the feeling for material is a most important element in fine art; and in knowledge there is only a relative distinction between formal and material relations.

Let us compare, for example, the use of number in understanding objects of different kinds.

Suppose there are four books in a heap on the table. This heap of books is the object. We desire to conceive it as a whole consisting of parts. In order to do so we simply count them “one, two, three, four books.” If one is taken away, there is one less to count; if one is added, there is one more. But the books themselves, as books, are not {51} altered by taking away one from them or adding one to them. They are parts indifferent to each other, forming a heap which is sufficiently analysed or synthesised by counting its parts.

But now instead of four books in a heap, let us think of the four sides of a square. Of course we can count them, as we counted the books; but we have not conceived the nature of the square by counting its sides. That does not distinguish it from four straight lines drawn anyhow in space. In order to appreciate what a square is, we must consider that the sides are equal straight lines, put together in a particular way so as to make a figure with four right angles; we must distinguish it from a figure with four equal sides, but its angles not right angles, and from a four-sided figure with right angles, but with only its opposite sides equal; and note that if we shorten up one side into nothing, the square becomes a triangle, with altogether different properties from those of a square; if we put in another side it becomes a pentagon, and so on.

These two things, the heap of books and the square, are prima facie objects of perception. We commonly speak of a diagram on a blackboard or in a book as “a square” if we have reason to take it as approximately exact, and as intended for a square. But on looking closer, we soon see that the “matter,” or individual attributes, of each of these objects of our apprehension demands a different form of knowledge from that necessary to the other. The judgment “This heap of books has four books in it” is a judgment of enumerative perception. The judgment “The square has four sides” is a judgment of systematic necessity.

{52} Why did we not keep the two judgments in the same logical shape? Why did we say “This heap” and “The square”? Why did we not say “this” in both propositions, or “the” in both propositions? Because the different “matter” demands this difference of form. Let us try. “The heap of books has four books in it.” Probably we interpret this proposition to mean just the same as if we had said “This heap.” That is owing to the fact that the judgment naturally occurs to us in its right form. But if we interpret “The heap” on the analogy of our interpretation of “The square,” our judgment will have become false.

It will have come to mean “Every heap of books has four books in it,” and a judgment of perception will not bear this enlargement. The subject is composite, and one, the most essential of its elements, is destroyed by the change from “this” to “the.”

Let us try again. Let us say “This square has four sides.” That is not exactly false, but it is ridiculous. Every square must have four sides, and by saying “this square” we strongly imply that foursidedness is a relation of which we are aware chiefly, if not exclusively, in the object attended to in the moment of judging, simply through the apprehension of that moment. By this implication the form of the judgment abandons and all but denies the character of systematic necessity which its content naturally demands. It is like saying, “It appears to me that in the present instance two and two make four.” The number of sides in a square, then, is not a mere fact of perception, while the number of books in a heap is such a fact.

But you may answer by suggesting the case that an {53} uninstructed person—say a child, with a square figure before him, and having heard the name square applied to figures generally resembling that figure, may simply observe the number of sides, without knowing any of the geometrical properties connected with it; will he not then be right in saying, “This square has four sides”?

Certainly not. In that case he has no right to call it a square. It would only be a name he had picked up without knowing what it meant. All he has the right to say would be, “This object” or “This figure has four sides.” That would be a consistent judgment of mere perception, true as far as it went. It is always possible to apprehend the more complex objects of knowledge in the simpler forms; but then they are not apprehended adequately, not as complex objects. It is also possible to apply very complex forms of knowledge to very simple objects. Most truths that can be laid down quite in the abstract about a human mind could also be applied in some sense or other to any speck of protoplasm, or to any pebble on the seashore. And every simple form of knowledge is always being pushed on, by its own defects and inconsistencies, in the direction of more complex forms.

So far I have been trying to show that objects are capable of being different in their nature as knowledge as well as in their individual properties; and that their different natures as knowledge depend on the way in which their parts are connected together. We took two objects of knowledge, and found that the mode of connection between the parts required two quite different kinds of judgment to express them. Let us look at the reason of this.

{54} The relation of Part and Whole

3. The relation of Part and Whole is a form of the relation of Identity and Difference. Every Judgment expresses the unity of some parts in a whole, or of some differences in an Identity. This is the meaning of “construction” in knowledge. We saw that knowledge exists in judgment as a construction (taking this to include maintenance) of reality.

The expression whole and parts may be used in a strict or in a lax sense.

In a strict sense it means a whole of quantity, that is, a whole considered as made up by the addition of parts of the same kind, as a foot is made up of twelve inches. In this sense the whole is the sum of the parts. And even in this sense the whole is represented within every part by an identity of quality that runs through them all. Otherwise there would be nothing to earmark them as belonging to the particular whole or kind of whole in question. Parts of length make up a whole of length, parts of weight a whole of weight, parts of intensity a whole of intensity, in so far as a whole of intensity is quantitative, which is not a perfectly easy question. Wholes like these are “Sums” or “Totals”. The relation of whole to part in this sense is a very simple case of the relation of differences in an identity, but for that very reason is not the easiest case to appreciate. The relation is so simple that it is apt to pass unnoticed, and in dealing with numerical computation we are apt to forget that in application to any concrete problem the numbers must be numbers of something having a common quality, and that the nature of this something may affect the result as related to real fact, though not as a conclusion from pure {55} numerical premisses. In a whole of pure number the indifference of parts to whole reaches its maximum. The unit remains absolutely the same, into whatever total of addition it may enter.

In a whole of differentiated members, such as a square, all this begins to be different. A side in a square possesses, by the fact of being a side, very different relations and properties from those of a straight line conceived in isolation. In this case the whole is not made up merely by adding the parts together. It is a geometrical whole, and its parts are combined according to a special form of necessity which is rooted in the nature of space. Speaking generally, the point is that parts must occupy certain perfectly definite places as regards each other. You cannot make a square by merely adding three right angles to one, nor by taking a given straight line and adding three more equal straight lines to its length. You must construct in a definite way so as to fulfil definite conditions. The identity shows itself in the different elements which make it up, not as a mere repeated quality, but as a property of contributing, each part in a distinctive way, to the nature of the whole. Such an identity is not a mere total or sum, though I imagine that its relations can be fully expressed in terms of quantity, certain differentiated objects or conceptions being given (e.g. line and angle).

I take a further instance to put a sharp point upon this distinction. The relation of whole and parts is nowhere more perfect, short of a living mind, than in a work of art. There is a very fine Turner landscape now [1] in the “Old {56} Masters” Exhibition at Burlington House—the picture of the two bridges at Walton-on-Thames. The picture is full of detail—figures, animals, trees, and a curving river-bed. But I am told that if one attempts to cut out the smallest appreciable fragment of all this detail, one will find that it cannot be done without ruining the whole effect of the picture. That means that the individual totality is so welded together by the master’s selective composition, that, according to Aristotle’s definition of a true “whole,” if any part is modified or removed the total is entirely altered, “for that of which the presence or absence makes no difference is no true part of the whole.” [2]

[1] February 1892. [2] Poetics, 8

Of course, in saying that the part is thus essential to the whole, it is implied that the whole reacts upon and transfigures the part. It is in and by this transformation that its pervading identity makes itself felt throughout all the elements by which it is constituted. As the picture would be ruined if a little patch of colour were removed, so the little patch of colour might be such as to be devoid of all value if seen on a piece of paper by itself. I will give an extreme instance, almost amounting to a tour de force, from the art of poetry, in illustration of this principle. We constantly hear and use in daily life the phrase, “It all comes to the same thing in the end.” Perhaps in the very commonest speech we use it less fully, omitting the word “thing”; but the sentence as written above is a perfectly familiar platitude, with no special import, nor grace of sound or rhythm. Now, in one of the closing stanzas of Browning’s poem Any Wife to Any Husband, this sentence, only modified {57} by the substitution of “at” for “in,” forms an entire line. [1] And I think it will generally be felt that there are few more stately and pathetic passages than this in modern poetry. Both the rhythm and sonorousness of the whole poem, and also its burden of ideal feeling, are communicated to the line in question by the context in which it is framed. Through the rhythm thus prescribed to it, and through the characteristic emotion which it contributes to reveal, the “whole” of the poem re-acts upon this part, and confers upon it a quality which, apart from such a setting, we should never have dreamed that it was capable of possessing.

[1] In order to remind the reader of the effect of this passage it is necessary to quote a few lines before and after—

“Re-issue words and looks from the old mint,
Pass them afresh, no matter whose the print,
Image and superscription once they bore!
Re-coin thyself and give it them to spend,—
It all comes to the same thing at the end,
Since mine thou wast, mine art and mine shalt be,
Faithful or faithless, sealing up the sum
Or lavish of my treasure, thou must come
Back to the heart’s place here I keep for thee!”

We are not here concerned with the peculiar “aesthetic” nature of works of art, which makes them, although rational, nevertheless unique individuals. I only adduced the above examples to show, in unmistakable cases, what is actually meant when we speak of “a whole” as constituted by a pervading identity which exhibits itself in the congruous or co-operating nature of all the constituent parts. In wholes of a higher kind than the whole of mere quantity the parts no longer repeat each other. They are not merely distinct, {58} but different. Yet the common or continuous nature shows itself within each of them.

The parts of a sum-total, taking them for convenience of summation as equal parts, may be called units; [1] the parts of an abstract system, such as a geometrical figure, may be called elements (I cannot answer for mathematical usage), and the parts of a concrete system, an aesthetic product, a mind, or a society, might be called members.

[1] A unit of measurement implies in addition that it has been equated with some accepted standard. If I divide the length of my room into thirty equal parts, each part is a “unit” in the sum-total; but I have not measured the room till I have equated one such part with a known standard, and thus made it into a unit in the general system of length equations.

But every kind of whole is an identity, and its parts are always differences within it.

Nature of Knowledge

4. It will be well to sum up here what we have learnt of the nature of knowledge in general, before passing to the definition and classification of Judgment.

Knowledge is always Judgment. Judgment is constructive, for us, of the real world. Constructing the real world means interpreting or amplifying our present perception by what we are obliged to think, which we take as all belonging to a single system one with itself, and with what constrains us in sense-perception, and objective in the sense that its parts act on each other independently of our individual apprehension, and that we are obliged to think them thus. The process of construction is always that of exhibiting a whole in its parts, i.e. an identity in its differences; that is to say, it is always both analytic and synthetic. The objects of knowledge differ in the mode of relation between their {59} parts and the whole, and thus give rise to different types of judgment and inference; and this difference in the form of knowledge is a difference in the content of Logic, which deals with the objects of experience only from the point of view of their properties as objects in an intellectual world.

Conclusion

5. I hope that these general lectures, which, as I am quite aware, have anticipated the treatment of many difficult questions which they have not attempted to solve, have been successful in putting the problem of Logic before us with some degree of vividness. If this problem were thoroughly impressed upon our minds, I should say that we had already gained something definite from this course of study. The points which I desire to emphasise are two.

(1) I hope that we have learned to realise the world of our knowledge as a living growth, sustained by the energy of our intelligence; and to understand that we do not start with a ready-made world in common, but can only enter upon the inheritance of science and civilisation as the result of courage, labour, and reasonable perseverance; and further, that we retain this inheritance just as long as our endurance and capacity hold out, and no longer.

And (2) I have attempted to make clear that this living growth, our knowledge, is like the vegetable or animal world in being composed of infinite minor systems, each and all of which are at bottom the same function with corresponding parts or elements, modified by adaption to the environment. So that the task of analysing the form of judgment bears a certain resemblance to that of analysing the forms of plants. Just as from the single cell of the undifferentiated Alga, to {60} the most highly organised flower or tree, we have the same formation, with its characteristic functions and operations, so from the undifferentiated judgment, which in linguistic form resembles an ejaculation or interjection, to the reasonable systems of exact or philosophical science, we find the same systematic function with corresponding elements.

But the world of knowledge has a unity which the world of organic individuals cannot claim; and this whole system of functions is itself, for our intelligence, approximately a single function or system, corresponding in structure to each of its individual parts, as though the plant world or animal world were itself in turn a plant or animal. We cannot hope to exhaust the shapes taken by the pervading fundamental function of intelligence. We shall only attempt to understand the analogies and differences between some few of its leading types.

{61}

LECTURE IV TYPES OF JUDGMENT AND THE GENERAL CONDITIONS INVOLVED IN ASSERTION

Correspondence between types of Judgment and nature of objects as Knowledge

1. The question of correspondence between the types of Judgment and the orders of Knowledge was really anticipated in discussing the relation between the content and the form of knowledge. We saw that the content or matter and nature known determines on the whole the form or method of knowledge by which it can be known.

I give a few cases of this correspondence, not professing to complete the list. We should accustom ourselves to think of these forms as constituting a progression in the sense that each of them betrays a reference to an ideal of knowledge which in itself it is unable to fulfil, and therefore inevitably suggests some further or divergent form. And the defect by which the forms contradict the ideal, is felt by us as a defect in their grasp of reality, in their presentation of real connections.

“Impersonal” Judgment

a. We think of the judgment as predicating an ideal content of a subject indicated in present perception. But there are judgments which scarcely have an immediate subject at all, such as “How hot!” “Bad!” “It hurts!” In the judgments thus represented the true subject is some {62} undefined aspect of the given complex presentation. Of course the words which we use are not an absolutely safe guide to the judgment—they may be merely an abbreviation. But there are typical judgments of this kind in which we merely mean to connect some namable content with that which can only be defined as the focus of attention at the moment. Such judgments might be called predications of mere quality. The only link by which they bind their parts into a whole is a feeling referred to our momentary surroundings. A mere quality, if not defined or analysed, or a feeling of pleasure or pain, is the sort of object which can be expressed in such a judgment.

Perceptive Judgment

b. Then we have the very wide sphere of perceptive judgment, which we may most conveniently confine to judgments which have in the subject elements analogous to “This,” “Here,” “Now.” Such particles as these indicate an effort to distinguish elements within the complex presented. They have no content beyond the reference to presentation, and, in “here” and “now,” an implication that the present is taken in a particular kind of continuum. Otherwise they mean nothing more or other than is meant by pointing with the finger. We may or may not help out a “subject” of this kind by definite ideas attached to it as conditions of the judgment. If we do, we are already on the road to a new form of knowledge, incompatible with the judgment of perception. For so long as we keep a demonstrative, spatial or temporal, reference in the thought, the subject of judgment is not cut loose from our personal focus of presentation. And as the existence of such a focus is undeniable, we are secure against criticism so far as the {63} content of the subject is concerned. But if we begin to specify it, we do so at our peril.

Such judgments as these have been called “Analytic judgments of sense.” [1] The term is not generally accepted in this meaning, but is conveniently illustrative of the nature of these judgments. It is intended to imply that they are a breaking up and reconstruction of what, in our usual loose way of talking, is said to be given in sense-perception. They remain on the whole within the complex of “that which” is presented.

[1] Mr. F.H. Bradley, Principles of Logic, p. 48.

From the point of view which we have taken, such judgments are not confined to what we think it worth while to say, but are the essence of every orderly and objective perception of the world around us. In a waking human consciousness nothing is unaffirmed.

We have no other term than perception to express the process which is employed in scientific observation and experiment. But it is plain that so soon as the judgment that refers to “This” is modified through the inevitable demand for qualification by exact ideas—“This hurts me,” “What hurts you?” “This old sprain, at the pace we are walking”—a conflict of elements has arisen within the judgment. And as commonplace perception passes into scientific observation, the qualifying ideas, on which truth and relevancy depend, dwarf the importance of the “this,” and ultimately oust it altogether. That is a simple case in which the ideal of knowledge and the nature of reality operate within the judgment to split asunder its primitive form. The subject as expressed by a pure demonstrative refuses to {64} take account either of truth, i.e. consistency with knowledge as a whole, or of relevancy, i.e. consistency with the relation involved in the particular predication that may be in question. Our commonplace perception halts between these two extremes. It deals with the world of individual objects and persons, which, being already systematised according to our current observations and interests, has, so long as we keep to its order, a sufficient degree of truth and relevancy for the needs of daily life. Thus if I say, “This book will do as a desk to write upon,” the truth of the qualification “book” (i.e. the reality of the subject) is assumed on the ground of the facility of recognising a well-known “thing,” while the relevancy of the qualification “book” is not questioned, because we accept an individual thing as an object of habitual interest qua individual, and do not demand that whenever it is named those properties alone should be indicated which are relevant to the purpose for which it is named. The “thing” is a current coin of popular thought, and makes common perception workable without straining after a special relevancy in the subject of every predication. Such special relevancy leads ultimately to the ideal of definition, in which subject and predicate are adequate to each other and necessarily connected. A definitory judgment drops the demonstrative and relies on qualifying ideas alone. It is therefore an abstract universal Judgment, while the Judgment of Perception, so long as it retains the demonstrative, is a Singular Judgment.

Proper names in Judgment

c. But a very curious example of a divergence or half-way house in Knowledge is that form of the singular Judgment in which the subject is a proper name. A proper name is {65} designative and not definitory. It may be described as a generalised demonstrative pronoun—a demonstrative pronoun which has the same particular reference in the mouth of every one who uses, it, and beyond the given present of time.

So the reference of a proper name is a good example of what we called a universal or an identity. That which is referred to by such a name is a person or thing whose existence is extended in time and its parts bound together by some continuous quality—an individual person or thing and the whole of this individuality is referred to in whatever is affirmed about it. Thus the reference of such a name is universal, not as including more than one individual, but as including in the identity of the individual numberless differences—the acts, events, and relations that make up its history and situation.

What kinds of things are called by Proper Names, and why? This question is akin to the doctrine of Connotation and Denotation, which will be discussed in the next lecture. It is a very good problem to think over beforehand, noting especially the limiting cases, in which either some people give proper names to things to which other people do not give them, or some things are given proper names while other things of the same general kind are not. These judgments, which are both Singular and Universal, may perhaps be called for distinction’s sake “Individual” Judgments.

Abstract Judgment

d. The demonstrative perception may also be replaced by a more or less complete analysis or definition.

Within this province Definition of a concrete whole is one extreme, e.g. “Human Society is a system of wills”; {66} that of an abstract whole the other extreme, “12 = 7 + 5.” There are all degrees, between these two, in the amount of modification which the parts undergo by belonging to the whole. There are also all sorts of incomplete definitions, expressing merely the effects of single conditions out of those which go to make up a whole. These form the abstract universal judgments of the exact sciences, such as, “If water is heated to 212° Fahr. under one atmosphere it boils.” In all these cases some idea, “abstract” as being cut loose from the focus of present perception, whether abstract or concrete in its content, replaces the demonstrative of the judgment which is a perception. These are the judgments which in the ordinary logical classification rank as universal.

The general definition of Judgment

2. It was quite right of us to consider some types of judgment before trying to define it generally. It is hopeless to understand a definition unless the object to be defined is tolerably familiar. We have said a great deal about knowledge and about judgment as the organ or medium of knowledge. Now we want to study particular judgments in their parts and working, and observe how they perform their function of constructing reality.

Now, for our purpose, we may take the clearest cases of judgment, viz. the meanings of propositions.

The distinctive character of Judgment as contrasted with every other act of mind is that it claims to be true, i.e. pre-supposes the distinction between truth and falsity.

First, we have to consider what is implied in claiming truth.

Secondly, by what means truth is claimed in Judgment.

{67} Thirdly, the nature of the ideas for which alone truth can be claimed.

What is implied in claiming truth

(i.) Claiming truth implies the distinction between truth and falsity. I do not say, “between truth and falsehood,” because falsehood includes a lie, and a lie is not prima facie, an error or falsity of knowledge. It is, as may be said of a question, altogether addressed to another person, and has no existence as a distinct species within knowledge. Thus a lie is called by Plato “falsehood in words”; the term “falsehood in the mind” he reserves for ignorance or error, which he treats as the worst of the two, which from an intellectual point of view it plainly is.

No distinction between truth and falsity can exist unless, in the act or state which claims truth, there is a reference to something outside psychical occurrence in the course of ideas. Falsity or error are relations that imply existences which, having reality of one kind, claim in addition to this another kind of reality which they have not. In fact, all things that are called false, are called so because they claim a place or property which they do not possess. They must exist, in order to be false. It is in the non-fulfilment, by their existence, of some claim or pretension which it suggests, that falsity consists. And so it is in the fulfilment of such a claim that truth has a meaning. A false coin exists as a piece of metal; it is false because it pretends to a place in the monetary system which its properties or history [1] contradict.

[1] For it is, I suppose, technically false, even if over value, if not coined by those who have the exclusive legal right to coin.

As the claim to be true is made by every judgment in its {68} form, there can be no judgment without some recognition of a difference between psychical occurrences and the system of reality. That is to say, there is no judgment unless the judging mind is more or less aware that it is possible to have an idea which is not in accordance with reality.

Thus, if an animal has no real world distinct from his train of mental images, if, that is, and just because, these are his world directly, and without discord, he cannot judge. The question is, e.g. when he seems disappointed, whether the pleasant image [1] simply disappears and a less pleasant image takes its place, or whether the erroneous image was distinguished as an element in “a mere idea,” which could be retained and compared with the systematised perceptions which force it out, as an idea with reality.

[1] It will be observed that we are not treating the mental images as being taken for such by the primitive mind. It is just in as far as they are not yet taken for such that they are merely such. Mr. James says that the first sensation is for the child the universe (Psychology II. 7). But it is a universe in which all is equally mere fact, and there is no distinction of truth and falsehood, or reality and unreality. That can only come when an existent is found to be a fraud.

We must all of us have seen a dog show signs of pleasure when he notices preparations for a walk, and then express the extreme of unhappiness when the walk is not taken at all, or he is left at home. People interpret these phenomena very carelessly. They say “he thought that he was going to be taken out.” If he did “think that, etc,” then he made a judgment. This would imply that he distinguishes between the images suggested to his mind, and the reality of their content as the future event of going out, and knew that he might have the one without the other following. But of {69} course it is quite possible that the dog has no distinct expectation of something different from his present images, but merely derives pleasure from them, which he expresses, and suffers and expresses pain when they are replaced by something else. It is here, no doubt, in the conflict of suggestion and perception, that judgment originates.

On the other hand, animals, especially domestic animals, do seem to use the imperative, which perhaps implies that they know what they want, and have it definitely contrasted with their present ideas as something to be realised.

However this may be, the claim of truth marks the minimum of Judgment. There can be no judgment until we distinguish psychical fact from the reference to Reality. A mere mental fact as such is not true or false. In other words, there is no judgment unless there is something that, formally speaking, is capable of being denied. When your dog sees you go to the front door, he may have an image of hunting a rabbit suggested to his mind, but so far there is nothing that can be denied. If he has the image, of course he has. There is nothing that can be denied until the meaning of this image is treated as a further fact beyond the image itself, in a system independent of the momentary consciousness in his mind. Then it is possible to say, “No, the fact does not correspond to your idea,” i.e. what we are ultimately obliged to think as a system is inconsistent with the idea as you affirmed it of the same system.

By what means the claim to truth is made

(ii.) The first thing then in Judgment is that we must have a world of reality distinguished from the course of our ideas. Thereupon the claim to truth is actually made by attaching the meaning of an idea to some point in the real {70} world. This can only be done where an identity is recognised between reality and our meaning.

Thus (keeping to the Judgment of Perception) I say, “This table is made of oak.” This table is given in perception already qualified by numberless judgments; it is a point in the continuous system or tissue which we take as reality. Among its qualities it has a certain grain and colour in the wood. I know the colour and grain of oak-wood, and if they are the same as those of the table, then the meaning or content “made of oak” coalesces with this point in reality, and instead of merely saying, “This table is made of wood that has such and such a grain and colour,” I am able to say “This table is made of oak-wood.”

This example shows the true distinction between the Logical Subject and Predicate. The fact is, that the ultimate subject in Judgment is always Reality. Of course the logical subject may be quite different from the grammatical subject. Some kinds of words cannot in strict grammar be made subjects of a sentence, though they can represent a logical subject quite well: e.g. “Now is the time.” “Here is the right place_.” Adverbs, I suppose, cannot be grammatical subjects. But in these sentences they stand for the logical subjects, certain points in the perceptive series.

The true logical subject then is always reality, however much disguised by qualifications or conditions. The logical predicate is always the meaning of an idea; and the claim to be true consists in the affirmation of the meaning as belonging to the tissue of reality at the point indicated by the subject. The connection is always made by identity of {71} content at the point where the idea joins the reality, so that the judgment always appears as a revelation of something which is in reality. It simply develops, accents, or gives accuracy to a recognised quality of the real. This is easily seen in cases of simple quality—e.g. “This colour is sky-blue.” The colour is given, and the judgment merely identifies it with sky-blue, and so reveals another element belonging to its identity, the element of being seen in the sky on a clear day.

The analysis is not quite so easy when there is a concrete subject like a person; for how can there be an identity between a person and a fact? “A.B. passed me in the street this afternoon.” Between what elements is the identity in this case? It is between him, as an individual whom I know by sight in other places, and him as he appeared this afternoon in particular surroundings. His identity already extends through a great many different particulars of time and place, and this judgment merely recognises one more particular as included in the same continuous history. “He in this context belongs to him in a former context.” In this simple case the operative identity is probably that of my friend’s personal appearance; but the judgment is not merely about that but about his whole personality, of which his personal appearance is merely taken as a sign.

Any assertion which is incredible because the identical quality is wanting will illustrate the required structure. There is a story commented on by Thackeray in one of his occasional papers, which implied that the Duke of Wellington took home note-paper from a club to which he did not {72} belong. (Thackeray gives the true explanation of the fact on which the suggestion was founded.) The identity concerned in this case would be that of character. Can we find an identity between the character involved in a piece of meanness like that suggested and the character of the Duke of Wellington? No; and prima facie therefore the judgment is false. The identity which should bind it together breaks it in two. But yet, again: supposing the external evidence to be strong enough, we may have to accept a fact which conflicts with a man’s character as we conceive it. That is so: in such a case one kind of identity appears to contradict the other. I may think that I saw a man with my own eyes, doing something which wholly contradicts his character as I judge it. Then there is a conflict between identity in personal appearance and identity in character, and we have to criticise the two estimates of identity—i.e. to refer them both to our general system of knowledge, and to accept the connection which can be best adapted to that system.

We have got, then, as the active elements in Judgment a Subject in
Reality, the meaning of an idea, and an identity between them.

Is this enough? Have we the peculiar act of affirmation wherever we have these conditions?

This is not the question by what elements of language the judgment is rendered. We shall speak of that in the next lecture. The question is now, simply, “Is a significant idea, referred to reality, always an assertion?”

The first answer seems to be that such an idea is always in an assertion, but need not constitute the whole of an {73} assertion. If we think of a subject in judgment which is represented by a relative sentence, it seems clear that any idea which can stand a predicate can also form a part of a subject. “The exhibition which it is proposed to hold at Chicago in 1893”—has in effect just the same elements of meaning, and just the same reference to a point in our world of reality as if the sentence ran, “It is proposed to hold an exhibition at Chicago in 1893.” In common parlance we should say, that in the former case we entertain an idea—or conceive or represent it—while in the latter case we affirm it.

But if we go on to say that the former kind of sentence as truly represents the nature of thought as the latter, then it seems that we are mistaken. Even language does not admit such a clause to the rank of an independent sentence.

If we insist on considering it in its isolation, we probably eke it out in thought by an unarticulated affirmation such as that which constitutes an impersonal judgment; in other words, we affirm it to belong to reality under some condition which remains unspecified. Thus the linguistic form of the relative clause, as also the separate existence of the spoken or written word, produces an illusion which has governed the greater part of logical theory so far as concerns the separation between concept and judgment, i.e. between entertaining ideas and affirming them in reality. In our waking life, all thought is judgment, every idea is referred to reality, and in being so referred, is ultimately affirmed of reality. The separation of elements in the texture of Judgment into Subjects and Predicates which, as separated, are conceived as possible Subjects and Predicates, is therefore {74} theoretical and ideal, an analysis of a living tissue, not an enumeration of loose bricks out of which something is about to be built up.

The kind of ideas which can claim truth

(iii.) “Idea” has two principal meanings.

(a) A psychical presentation and

(b) An identical reference.

This distinction is the same as that between our course of ideas and our world of knowledge. We must try now to define it more accurately.

(a) An idea as a psychical presentation is strictly a particular. Every moment of consciousness is full of a given complex of presentation which passes away and can never be repeated without some difference. For this purpose a representation is just the same as a presentation; is, in fact, a presentation. Its detail at any given moment is filled in by the influence of the moment, and it can never occur again with precisely the same elements of detail as before. If we use the term “idea” in this sense, as a momentary particular mental state, it is nonsense to speak of having the same idea twice, or of referring it to a reality other than our mental life. The idea in this sense is a psychical image. We cannot illustrate this usage by any recognisable part of our mental furniture, for every such part which can be described and indicated by a general name, is something more than a psychical image. We can only say that that which at any moment we have in consciousness, when our waking perception encounters reality, is such an idea, and so too is the image supplied by memory, when considered simply as a datum, a fact, in our mental history.

(b) To get at the other sense of “idea” we should think {75} of the meaning of a word; a very simple case is that of a proper name. What is the meaning of “St. Paul’s Cathedral in London”? No two people who have seen it have carried away precisely the same image of it in their minds, nor does memory, when it represents the Cathedral to each of them, supply the same image in every detail and association twice over to the same person, nor do we for a moment think that such an image is the Cathedral. [1] Yet we neither doubt that the name means something, and that the same to all those who employ it, nor that it means the same to each of them at one time that it did at every other time. The psychical images which formed the first vision of it are dead and gone for ever, and so, after every occasion on which it has been remembered, are those in which that memory was evoked. The essence of the idea does not lie in the peculiarities of any one of their varying presentations, but in the identical reference that runs through them all, and to which they all serve as material, and the content of this reference is the object of our thought.

[1] When we are actually looking at the Cathedral, we say, “That is the Cathedral.” Does not this mean that we take our momentary image, to which we point, to be the reality of the Cathedral? Not precisely so. It is the “that,” not our definite predication about it, which makes us so confident. The “that” is identified by our judgment, but goes beyond it.

In order to distinguish and employ this reference it is necessary that there should be a symbol for it, and so long as it brings us to the object which is the centre of the entire system, this symbol may vary within considerable limits.

The commonest and most secure means of reference is {76} the word or name. [1] So confident are we in the “conventional” or artificially adapted character of this mark or sign of reference, that we are inclined to treat it as absolutely unvarying on every occasion of utterance. But of course it is not unvarying. It differs in sound every time it is spoken, and in context and appearance every time we see it in a written shape. Our reliance upon it as identical throughout depends on the fact that it has a recognisable character to which its variations are irrelevant, and which practically crushes out these variations from our attention. Unless we are on the look-out for mispronunciations or misprints, they do not interfere at all with our attention to the main reference of words. We know that it is almost impossible to detect misprints so long as one reads a book with attention to its meaning. This then is a fair parallel to the distinction which we are considering between two kinds of ideas. If the momentary sound or look of a word is analogous to idea as psychical presentation, “the word” as a permanent possession of our knowledge is analogous to the idea as a reference to an object in our systematic world, and is the normal instrument of such a reference.

[1] “A name is a sound which has significance according to convention,” i.e. according to rational agreement.—Ar. de Interp. 16a 19.

But either with the word or without it there may be a symbol of another kind. Any psychical image that falls within certain limits may appear as the momentary vehicle of the constant reference to an object. Just as in recognising the reference of a word we omit to notice the accent and loudness with which it is pronounced, or the quality of the paper on which it is printed, just so in recognising the {77} reference of a psychical image our attention fails to note its momentary context, colouring, and detail. If it includes something that definitely belongs to a systematic object in our world of objects, that is enough, unless counteracted by cross references, to effect the suggestion we require, and that, and nothing else, arrests our attention for the moment. When I think of St. Paul’s Cathedral, it may be the west front, or the dome seen from the outside, or the gallery seen from the inside, that happens to occur to my mind; and further, that which does occur to me occurs in a particular form or colouring, dictated by the condition of my memory and attention at the moment. But these peculiarities are dwarfed by the meaning, and unless I consider them for psychological purposes, I do not know that they are there. It is the typical element only, the element which points to the common reference in which my interest centres, that forms the content of the idea in this sense, taken not as a transient feature of the mental complex, but as definitely suggesting a constant object in our constructed world. And it suggests this object because it, the typical element, is a common point that links together the various cases and the various presentations in which the object is given to us. In this sense it is a universal or an identity.

How can this conception of a logical idea be applied to a perfectly simple presentation? It would be impossible so to apply it, but there does not seem to be such a thing as a simple presentation in the sense of a presentation that has no connection as a universal with anything else. In the image of a particular blue colour, we cannot indeed separate out what makes it blue from what makes it the particular {78} shade of blue that it is. But nevertheless its blueness makes it a symbol to us of blue in general, and when so thought of, crushes out of sight all the visible peculiarities that attend every spatial surface. We understand perfectly well that the colour is blue, and that in saying this we have gone beyond the limits of the momentary image, and have referred something in it as a universal quality to our world of objects. An idea, in this sense, is both less and more than a psychical image. It contains less, but stands for more. It includes only what is central and characteristic in the detail of each mental presentation, and therefore omits much. But it is not taken as a mental presentation at all, but as a content belonging to a systematic world of objects independent of my thought, and therefore stands for something which is not mere psychical image.

If therefore we are asked to display it as an image, as something fixed in a permanent outline, however pale or meagre, we cannot do so. It is not an abstract image, but a concrete habit or tendency. It can only be displayed in the judgment, that is, in a concrete case of reference to reality. Apart from this, it is a mere abstraction of analysis, a tendency to operate in a certain way upon certain psychical presentations. Psychically speaking, it is when realised in judgment a process more or less systematic, extending through time, and dealing with momentary presentations as its material. In other words, we may describe it as a selective rule, shown by its workings but not consciously before the mind—for if it were, it would no longer be an idea, but an idea of an idea.

Every judgment, whether made with language or without, {79} is an instance of such an idea, which may be called a symbolic idea as distinct from a psychical image; “symbolic” because the mental units or images involved are not as such taken as the whole of the object for which they stand, but are in a secondary sense, as the word in a primary sense, symbols or vehicles only.

Such ideas can have truth claimed for them, because they have a reference beyond their mental existence. They point to an object in a system of permanent objects, and that to which they point may or may not suit the relation which they claim for it. Therefore the judgment can only be made by help of symbolic ideas. Mere mental facts, occurrences in my mental history, taken as such, cannot enter into judgment. When we judge about them, as in the last sentence, they are not themselves subject or predicate, but are referred to, like any other facts, by help of a selective process dealing with our current mental images of them. We shall not be far wrong then, if in every judgment, under whatever disguises it may assume, we look for elements analogous to those which are manifest in the simple perceptive judgment, “This is green,” or “That is a horse.” The relation between these and more elaborate forms of affirmation, such as the abstract judgment of science, has partly been indicated in the earlier portion of this lecture. The general definition of judgment has therefore been sufficiently suggested on p. 72. Judgment is the reference of a significant idea to a subject in reality, by means of an identity of content between them.

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