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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LECTURE V THE PROPOSITION AND THE NAME
Judgment translated into language.
1. Judgment expressed in words is a Proposition. Must Judgment be expressed in words? We have assumed that this need not be so. Mill [1] says of Inference that “it is an operation which usually takes place by means of words, and in complicated cases can take place in no other way.” The same is true of Judgment.
[1] Logic vol. I. c. i., init.
We may say in general that words are not needed, when thinking about objects by help of pictorial images will do the work demanded of the mind, i.e. when perfectly individualised connections in space and time are in question. Mr. Stout [1] gives chess-playing as an example. With the board before him, even an ordinary player does not need words to describe to himself the move which he is about to make.