[49] This conclusion is clearly recognized by Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 4.
[50] It would be suggestive to inquire in what sense conscious thought claims to know. Is it a general claim which thought qua thought puts forth, or is it the claim of the content of some particular thought? The former, of course, is a mere pious aspiration having no reference to specific validity or truth; the latter is precisely the problem under consideration.
[51] Bosanquet would seem to have followed Lotze in this insertion of a world of "meanings" intermediate between the individual idea as such and the real object as such. See the criticism already passed, pp. 93-5.
[52] Or, the situation as questioned is itself a fact, and a perfectly determinate (though not determined) one. See pp. 38, 50.
[53] Of course, the distinction between the process of arriving as temporal, and the essential relation of subject and predicate as eternal, harks back to the notion of judgment as the process by which "we" reproduce, or make real for ourselves, a reality already real within itself. And it involves just the same difficulties. The relation of subject and predicate—this simultaneous distinction and mutual reference—has meaning only in an act of adjustment, of attempt to control, within which we distribute our conditions. When the act is completed, the relation of subject and predicate, as subject and predicate, quite disappears. An eternal relation of the two is meaningless; we might as well talk of an eternal reaching for the same distant object by the same hand. In such conceptions, we have only grasped a momentary phase of a situation, isolated it, and set it up as an entity. Significant results would be reached by considering the "synthetic" character (in the Kantian sense) of judgment from this point of view. All modern logicians agree that judgment must be ampliative, must extend knowledge; that a "trifling proposition" is no judgment at all. What does this mean save that judgment is developmental, transitive, in effect and purport? And yet these same writers conceive of Reality as a finished system of content in a complete and unchangeable single Judgment! It is impossible to evade the contradiction save by recognizing that since it is the business of judgment to transform, its test (or Truth) is successful performance of the particular transformation it has set itself, and that transformation is temporal.
[54] It is worth considering whether this may not be the reality of Royce's distinction between outer and inner meaning. An anticipation of experience is the working prerequisite of the control which will realize the idea, i. e., the experience anticipated. One is no more "inner" or "outer" than the other.
[55] Logik, p. 304.
[56] De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 55, 56; quoted by Welton, Logic, Vol. II, p. 60.
[57] Advanced grammarians treat this matter in a way which should be instructive to logicians. The hypothesis, says Sweet (§ 295 of A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical, Oxford, 1892), suggests an affirmation or negation "as objects of thought." "In fact, we often say supposing (that is, 'thinking') it is true, instead of if it is true." In a word, the hypothetical judgment as such puts explicitly before us the content of thought, of the predicate or hypothesis; and in so far is a moment in judgment rather than adequate judgment itself.
[58] This carries with it, of course, the notion that "sensation" and "image" are not distinct psychical existences in themselves, but are distinguished logical forces.