This suggestion is very useful as carrying on the simplest type of Judgment throughout the whole theory of Judgment. By a little torture of expression any Judgment can be thrown into a form in which undefined Reality is the general subject, and the whole mass of the Judgment is the Predicate. “William Pitt was a great statesman” = “There was a great statesman named William Pitt”; “The three angles of every triangle are equal to two right angles” = “There are figures known as triangles with their three angles equal to two right angles”; “All citizens are members of a moral order” = “There is a moral order, including the {108} relations of citizenship”; “All trespassers will be prosecuted” = “Here are conditions which ensure the prosecution of possible trespassers.” Or you might always put a subject, “Reality is such that”—“Reality is characterised by.”
Thus we see that, as we have said before, in every Judgment the ultimate subject is Reality, the world in contact with us as we have already qualified it by previous Judgment. It is a less mistake to reject the Subject and Predicate in the Judgment altogether, than to think that they are separate things or ideas, and that in judging you pass or change from one to the other. Always bear in mind that it is possible to mass the whole Judgment as a single Predicate directly or indirectly true of Reality.
Having said this much, to make the Unity of the Judgment unmistakable, we may now safely distinguish between the Subject and Predicate in the Judgment. And we shall find the safest clue to be that the explicit Subject, when there is one, marks the place at which, or the conditions under which, Reality accepts the Predicate. The natural Subject is concrete, and the Predicate abstract; the Subject real, and the Predicate ideal, but pronounced to be real. The reason of this is that every Judgment is the connection of parts in a whole, and to be a whole is the characteristic of reality. In other words, the natural course of thought is to define further what is already in great part defined, and our real world is that which we have so far defined. The isolated judgments of the text-books make it very hard to grasp this, because you seem to begin anywhere for no connected reason at all. But if we reflect on actual thought, {109} we find that, as Mr. Stout very cleverly says, we are always developing a “subject” which is in our minds (in the ordinary sense of a “subject of conversation”), and this subject is some region or province of the world of reality.
Now the explicit Subject in Judgment or the grammatical Subject in Proposition does not always set out the full nature of this, but merely some mark or point in it which we wish to insist upon. So that we may find in Judgment almost anything serving as explicit Subject. Thus, as Aristotle said quite plainly and sensibly, it is natural to say “The horse is white,” but we may have occasion to say “This white is a horse”; it depends on the way in which the Subject comes into our minds. [1] Usually the Subject will be what Dr. Venn calls the heavier term, i.e. the term with more connotation. When there is no difference of concreteness between parts and whole, the Judgment becomes reversible as in the equation 7 + 5 = 12. There is no distinction here between Subject and Predicate. The real underlying unity or Subject is the numerical system.
[1] See Prof. Bain, p. 56, upon the Universe, and Universe of Discourse, i.e. the general subject which you have in your mind.
Therefore by recognising Subject and Predicate we represent the organisation of knowledge, and the connection of inherence or consequence within the content of our knowledge. If we do not recognise this distinction we throw the whole of Judgment into an undifferentiated mass of fact, running all assertion into the same mould, “It is the case that,” etc. One difficulty still remains. If the relation between Subject and Predicate is within an idea, and not between ideas—that is, if the whole explicit content, Subject and {110} Predicate together, can be regarded as predicated of reality,—why is the act of predication expressed by a verb, i.e. a sign of activity within this content? Why is a verb often if not always the form of predication which connotes Subject and Predicate? Not because it is a time-word. On the contrary, we want to get rid of the tense in Logic. The time of a Judgment ought to be determined only by the special connection between Subject and Predicate, not by tense, because tense is always subjective, merely relative to the time of speaking, and is accidental to the content of Judgment. Action seems nearer to what we want; the verb expresses both action and predicate. But the idea of action again does not make a predication, and the verb “is” does not really indicate action. Perhaps it is the demonstrative element in a finite verb that makes it the vehicle of predication, i.e. in a finite verb you have a meaning referred by a demonstrative element to something else. Originally the meaning was always an action; “is” of course meant “breathes.” But now the verb has lost vitality by wear and tear, and only refers something to something else. The puzzle is that the Judgment is not referred to us who make it, but is expressed as if it was accomplished by something outside us. That puzzle points to the essential feature which we insisted on, viz. its objectivity; in predication we refer what is mentally our act to a subject that represents the real world, not to ourselves at all. When I say “Gladstone comes to London this week,” the verb which expresses Gladstone’s action also expresses that my real world in his person accepts the qualification “coming to London this week.” Because of this objectivity of thought, I attribute to {111} the real world and not to myself the connection which is presented to my mind, and so it takes its place as an act of the real world. But I might throw the whole content into the Predicate by saying, “The ideal content ‘Gladstone coming to London this week’ is a predication true of Reality.” Thus though the distinction between Subject and Predicate best exhibits the living structure of knowledge, we must beware of the notion that two ideas or two things are needed for Judgment.
{112}
LECTURE VII THE CATEGORICAL AND HYPOTHETICAL CHARACTERS IN JUDGMENT
Some criticism on the ordinary scheme [1]
1. We will first consider why we want to examine the types of Judgment, and then what arrangement of them best fulfils our want.