A narrower meaning
(b) A more artificial meaning is to take the Judgment as not formed by imperfect description, but by imperfect enumeration (understanding it almost wholly in denotation). “Some Conservatives are in favour of women’s suffrage.” This means or may mean that we have counted a certain number, large or small, who are so, and we may or may not know about the others. Thus understood, the Judgment challenges complete enumeration; it contains of course the elements of a fraction—half, most, nine-tenths of, and so on.
This again is Categorical; not merely because it implies counting, but because it implies counting units separately given to experience.
The Particular Judgment does not include our Impersonal and Demonstrative Judgments; they are not classed in the common text-books. But as referring to perception they too are categorical and assert facts, whether they have ideas to help out the perceptive reference or not. And there is no reason against including them under the Particular Judgment. The assertion, “This engine can drag a train a mile a minute,” is much the same kind of Judgment as, “Some engines can, etc.” Either of these would be false {118} if no such engines existed. These Judgments are of the essence of perception. They have the connection of content and the undefined complex of presentation struggling together in them. They assert fact.
Singular Judgment
(2) The Singular Judgment of the common Logic is pretty much our Judgment with a proper name, which I call Individual, and which, as we saw, is in part rightly called universal—because the Subject extends beyond perception, and the Predicate follows the Subject. But it is a concrete or individual Universal, not an abstract Universal, and therefore asserts the existence of its Subject. The reason why it is taken to assert the reality of its Subject must be, I suppose, that it can assert this, its Subject being a name for an existence that has limited reality within the temporal series, and cannot assert anything else, not having any general fixed content or connotation which could imply a general connection of Subject and Predicate. The general connection of content which is so fatal to the asserting of fact does not exist in this case. We see this in Mill’s instance. “The summit of Chimborazo is white,” When the Subject is a unique name with precise connotation, “The centre of gravity of the material universe is variable,” then we are passing into the abstract Universal, and I think we may take such a Judgment perhaps as one of the best examples of a conjunction of categorical and hypothetical meaning, i.e. of a connection of content ascribed to a Subject affirmed to exist. But usually one meaning or the other is uppermost.
These Judgments, called Singular or Individual, correspond to the region of history or narrative. The realities {119} with which they deal have their definite position in a single system of time and space, and this is often made emphatic by the use of tenses. But these change with the date relative to the speaker, so that a Judgment with real tense must once have been false, or must become false by lapse of time. Thus the Judgment of fact may be not absolutely true. Nothing is genuinely true which a change of date can make false. The permanently true time-relations between Subject and Predicate are determined by their content, and the copula is not a tense, but a mere sign of affirmation. The Singular as Categorical is sharply distinguished from the Abstract Universal, with which common Logic classes it.
Universal Judgment
(3) Down to this point the judgment states a fact. When we come to the ordinary universal affirmative, we see at once that it may express very different meanings. In its natural meaning it strongly implies that its Subject has a particular existence within the series of time and space, but hardly asserts it.
Import of Propositions