The Necessity for Growing Concepts.—The development of our concepts constitutes a large part of our education. For it is evident that, since thinking rests so fundamentally on concepts, progress in our mental life must depend on a constant growth in the number and character of our concepts. Not only must we keep on adding new concepts, but the old must not remain static. When our concepts stop growing, our minds have ceased to grow—we no longer learn. This arrest of development is often seen in persons who have settled into a life of narrow routine, where the demands are few and of a simple nature. Unless they rise above their routine, they early become "old fogies." Their concepts petrify from lack of use and the constant reconstruction which growth necessitates.
On the other hand, the person who has upon him the constant demand to meet new situations or do better in old ones will keep on enriching his old concepts and forming new ones, or else, unable to do this, he will fail in his position. And the person who keeps on steadily enriching his concepts has discovered the secret of perpetual youth so far as his mental life is concerned. For him there is no old age; his thought will be always fresh, his experience always accumulating, and his knowledge growing more valuable and usable.
5. JUDGMENT
But in the building up of percepts and concepts, as well as in making use of them after they are formed, another process of thinking enters; namely, the process of judging.
Nature of Judgment.—Judging enters more or less into all our thinking, from the simplest to the most complex. The babe lies staring at his bottle, and finally it dawns on his sluggish mind that this is the object from which he gets his dinner. He has performed a judgment. That is, he has alternately directed his attention to the object before him and to his image of former nursing, discovered the relation existing between the two, and affirmed to himself, "This is what gives me my dinner." "Bottle" and "what-gives-me-my-dinner" are essentially identical to the child. Judgment is, then, the affirmation of the essential identity of meaning of two objects of thought. Even if the proposition in which we state our judgment has in it a negative, the definition will still hold, for the mental process is the same in either case. It is as much a judgment if we say, "The day is not-cold," as if we say, "The day is cold."
Judgment Used in Percepts and Concepts.—How judgment enters into the forming of our percepts may be seen from the illustration just given. The act by which the child perceived his bottle had in it a large element of judging. He had to compare two objects of thought—the one from past experience in the form of images, and the other from the present object, in the form of sensations from the bottle—and then affirm their essential identity. Of course it is not meant that what I have described consciously takes place in the mind of the child; but some such process lies at the bottom of every perception, whether of the child or anyone else.
Likewise it may be seen that the forming of concepts depends on judgment. Every time that we meet a new object which has to be assigned its place in our classification, judgment is required. Suppose the child, with his immature concept dog, sees for the first time a greyhound. He must compare this new specimen with his concept dog, and decide that this is or is not a dog. If he discovers the identity of meaning in the essentials of the two objects of thought, his judgment will be affirmative, and his concept will be modified in whatever extent greyhound will affect it.
Judgment Leads to General Truths.—But judgment goes much farther than to assist in building percepts and concepts. It takes our concepts after they are formed and discovers and affirms relations between them, thus enabling us finally to relate classes as well as individuals. It carries our thinking over into the realm of the universal, where we are not hampered by particulars. Let us see how this is done. Suppose we have the concept man and the concept animal, and that we think of these two concepts in their relation to each other. The mind analyzes each into its elements, compares them, and finds the essential identity of meaning in a sufficient number to warrant the judgment, man is an animal. This judgment has given a new bit of knowledge, in that it has discovered to us a new relation between two great classes, and hence given both, in so far, a new meaning and a wider definition. And as this new relation does not pertain to any particular man or any particular animal, but includes all individuals in each class, it has carried us over into universals, so that we have a general truth and will not have to test each individual man henceforth to see whether he fits into this relation.
Judgments also, as we will see later, constitute the material for our reasoning. Hence upon their validity will depend the validity of our reasoning.
The Validity of Judgments.—Now, since every judgment is made up of an affirmation of relation existing between two terms, it is evident that the validity of the judgment will depend on the thoroughness of our knowledge of the terms compared. If we know but few of the attributes of either term of the judgment, the judgment is clearly unsafe. Imperfect concepts lie at the basis of many of our wrong judgments. A young man complained because his friend had been expelled from college for alleged misbehavior. He said, "Mr. A—— was the best boy in the institution." It is very evident that someone had made a mistake in judgment. Surely no college would want to expel the best boy in the institution. Either my complainant or the authorities of the college had failed to understand one of the terms in the judgment. Either "Mr. A——" or "the best boy in the institution" had been wrongly interpreted by someone. Likewise, one person will say, "Jones is a good man," while another will say, "Jones is a rascal." Such a discrepancy in judgment must come from a lack of acquaintance with Jones or a lack of knowledge of what constitutes a good man or a rascal.