IV. That every proposition is the expression of a comparison between concepts. Sometimes called the Conceptualist View.
"To judge," Hamilton says, "is to recognise the relation of congruence or confliction in which two concepts, two individual things, or a concept and an individual compared together stand to each other."
This way of regarding propositions is permissible or not according to our interpretation of the words "congruence" and "confliction," and the word "concept". If by concept we mean a conceived attribute of a thing, and if by saying that two concepts are congruent or conflicting, we mean that they may or may not cohere in the same thing, and by saying that a concept is congruent or conflicting with an individual that it may or may not belong to that individual, then the theory is a corollary from Aristotle's analysis. Seeing that we must pass through that analysis to reach it, it is obviously not a theory of ordinary thought, but of the thought of a logician performing that analysis.
The precise point of Hamilton's theory was that the logician does not concern himself with the question whether two concepts are or are not as a matter of fact found in the same subject, but only with the question whether they are of such a character that they may be found, or cannot be found, in the same subject. In so far as his theory is sound, it is an abstruse and technical way of saying that we may consider the consistency of propositions without considering whether or not they are true, and that consistency is the peculiar business of syllogistic logic.
V. That the ultimate subject of every judgment is reality.
This is the form in which Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet deny the Ultra-Conceptualist position. The same view is expressed by Mill when he says that "propositions are concerned with things and not with our ideas of them".
The least consideration shows that there is justice in the view thus enounced. Take a number of propositions:—
The streets are wet.