ways altogether unknown and is finally occult? We seem here to be asking, in another form, for the limits of explanation, and it would be the task of metaphysics to pursue an enquiry which must here be broken off.45 § 53- We have seen that, what hypothetical judgments assert, is simply the quality which is the ground of the con sequence. And all abstract universal, we have seen are CHAP. II FORMS OF JUDGMENT 89 hypothetical. It may here be asked, Are the two things one? Are all hypothetical judgments thus universal?
This might for a moment appear to be doubtful, since the real, to which application is made, is at times an individual. And for the purposes of this, and the following section, I will give some examples; "If God is just the wicked will be punished," " Had I a toothache I should be wretched," " If there were a candle in this room it would be light," "If it is now six o'clock we shall have dinner in an hour," " If this man has taken that dose, he will be dead in twenty minutes/* It may surprise some readers to hear that these judgments are as universal as " All men are mortal: " but I think we shall find that such is the case.46 In the first place it is certain that in none of these judg ments is the subject taken to be actually real. We do not say above that a just God exists, or that I have a toothache; we only suppose it. The subject is supposed, and, if we consider further, we shall find that subject is nothing more than an ideal content, and that what is asserted is not any thing beside a connection of adjectives. The " that," the "this," the "I," the "now," do not really pass into the supposition. They are the point of reality to which we apply our ideal experiment, but they themselves are in no case sup posed. More or less of their content is used in the hypothesis, and passes into the subject. But, apart from themselves, their content can not possibly be called individual.
§ 54. This would hardly be doubtful, were it not for the ambiguity of all these assertions, a point to which we should carefully attend. " If he had murdered he would have been hanged," may perhaps assert nothing but the general connec tion of hanging with murder, and the " he " is irrelevant. But " if God is just the wicked will be punished," may perhaps not say that punishment would follow from any justice, but only from justice that is qualified by omnipotence. On the other hand, when you say " If this man has taken that dose, &c.," you do not tell me if his speedy death would happen because the dose would poison any one, or would only poison such a man as he is, or would not even poison such a kind of man, unless under present special conditions. And the other examples would all entangle us in similar ambiguities. The go THE PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC BOOK I supposition is not made evident, and reflection convinces us that, supposing we know the subject of the judgment, at all events we do not display our knowledge.
§ 55. And since this is so, since the adjectival content is not made explicit, since all we have is an indefinite reference to this or that case, we fall into the mistake of thinking it is the particular we have to deal with. But our real assertion, when we come to analyze it, never takes in the " that," or the " now," or the " this." It is always the content about which we assert. But, because we are not clear what that content is, and because we know it is to be found in the individual as supposed, we fire, so to speak, a charge of shot instead of a bullet, and take the individual as the point of reality to which our supposition is to be confined. In this way we give rise to the erroneous idea that the reality itself passes into the supposal. The fact, as we have seen, is that some of the content either is or makes part of the adjectival condition about which we assert. But, because that content has not been analyzed, we go to the individual to get it in the lump. The real judgment is concerned with nothing but the indi vidual's qualities, and asserts no more than a connection of adjectives. In every case it is strictly universal as well as hypothetical.
§ 56. We have found, thus far, that all abstract judgments are hypothetical, and in this connection we have endeavoured to show what a supposition is, and to lay bare that occult affirmation as to the real, which is made in every hypothetical judgment. Singular judgments we have already discussed, and we found that, be they analytic or synthetic, they all at first sight seem categorical. They do not merely attribute to the real a latent quality, which manifests itself in an unreal relation, but they qualify the real by the actual content which appears in the judgment. It is not the mere connection, but the very elements which they declare to exist.
We have still remaining another kind of judgment (§7), but, before we proceed, it is better to consider the result we have arrived at. That result perhaps may call for revision, and it is possible that the claim of the singular judgment to a categoric position may not maintain itself.
CHAP. II FORMS OF JUDGMENT QI CHAPTER II (Continued) § 57- What is the position in which we now find our selves? We began with the presumption that a judgment, if true, must be true of reality. On the other hand we found that every abstract universal judgment was but hypothetical. We have endeavoured to reconcile these conflicting views by showing in what way, and to what extent, a conditional judg ment asserts of the fact. But singular judgments stand apart, and have claimed to be wholly categorical, and true of the reality; and hence they demand a position above that given to universal judgments. We must now scrutinize this pre tension. We must still defer all notice of those individual judgments which transcend the series of events in time. Con fining ourselves to judgments about the phenomenal series, let us proceed to ask, Are they categorical? Do they truly and indeed rank higher, and closer to the real world, than those universal judgments which we found were hypothetical? We shall perhaps do well to prepare our minds for an unwelcome conclusion.
In passing from the singular to the universal judgment, we seem to have been passing away from reality. Instead of a series of actual phenomena connected with the point of present perception, we have but a junction of mere adjectivals, the existence of which we do not venture to affirm. In the one case we have what seem solid facts; in the other we have noth ing but a latent quality, the mere name of which makes us feel uneasy. We have not quite lost our hold of the real, but we seem to have left it a long way off. We keep our con nection by an impalpable thread with a veiled and somewhat ambiguous object.
But our thoughts may perhaps take a different colour, if we look around us in the region we have come to. However strange it may seem to us at first, yet our journey towards shadows and away from the facts has brought us at last to g2 THE PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC BOOK I the wo-ld of science. The end of science, we all have been taught, is the discovery of laws; and a law is nothing but a hypothetical judgment. It is a proposition which asserts a synthesis of adjectivals. It is universal and abstract. And it does not assert the existence of either of the elements it connects.47 It may imply this (§6), but such an implication is not essential. In mathematics,* for instance, the truth of our statement is absolutely independent of the existence of either subject or predicate. In physics or chemistry the truth does not depend on the actual existence at the present moment of the elements and their relation. If it did so, the law might be true at one instant and false at the next. When the physio logist, again, tells us that strychnine has a certain effect on nerve-centres, he does not wait to enunciate his law until he is sure that some dose of strychnine is operating in the world; nor does he hasten to recall it as soon as he has lost that assurance. It would be no advantage to dwell upon this point. It may be regarded now as a certain result, that the strict expression for all universal laws must begin with an " if," and go on with a " then."
§ 58. And from this we may draw a certain presumption. If the singular judgment is nearer the fact, and if, in leaving it, we have actually receded from reality, yet at least in sci ence that is not felt to be the case. And there is another pre sumption which may help to strengthen us. In common life we all experience the tendency to pass from one single case to some other instance. We take what is true at one time and place to be always true at all times and places. We generalize from a single example. We may deplore this tendency as an ineradicable vice of the unphilosophic mind, or we may recog nize it as the inevitable condition of all experience, and the sine qua non of every possible inference (vid. Book II.). But in either case, let us recognize it or deplore it, we still do not feel the passage we have made as an attempt to go from the stronger to the weaker, from that which is more true to that which is less. And yet, without doubt, it is a transition away from the individual to the universal and hypothetical.
§ 59. But a matter of this sort is not settled by presump tions. There are prejudices, it may be, that operate both ways. And we may be told, on behalf of the singular judg- CHAP. II FORMS OF JUDGMENT 93 ment, that it is the fact that these judgments are categorical. For they do assert the actual existence of their adjectival con tent, and, attributing to the real an explicit quality, they are truer than any hypothetical judgment, if indeed they are not the only true judgments. Such, we take it, is the claim of the singular judgment, and it can not be denied that its claim in one respect is very well founded. It does assert the existence of its content, and does affirm directly of the real. But the answer we must make is that, although it does so assert and affirm, yet, when we leave the popular view and look more closely at the truth of things, the assertion and affirmation which it makes are false, and the claim it puts forward rests on a mistake. We must subject the pretensions of the singu lar judgment to an examination which we think may prove fatal.48 § 60. We need spend no time on the synthetic judgment. In transcending what is given by actual perception, we without any doubt make use of an inference. A synthesis of ad jectives is connected with the present by virtue of the identity of a point of content. By itself this synthesis is merely uni versal, and is therefore hypothetical. It becomes categoric solely by relation to that which is given, and hence the whole weight of the assertion rests on the analytic judgment. If that is saved, it will then be time to discuss its extension; but if, on the other hand, the analytic be lost, it carries with it the synthetic judgment.
§61. Let us turn at once to the judgments which assert within what is given in present perception. These seem categorical because they content themselves with the analysis of the given, and predicate of the real nothing but a content that is directly presented. And hence it appears that the ele ments of these judgments must actually exist. An ideal con tent is attributed to the real, which that very real does now present to me. I am sure that nothing else is attributed. I am sure that I do not make any inference, and that I do not generalize. And how then can my assertion fail to be true? How, if true, can it fail to be categorical?
We maintain, on the other hand, that analytic judgments of sense are all false. There are more ways than one of saying the thing that is not true. It is not always necessary to Q4 THE PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC BOOK I go beyond the facts. It is often more than enough to come short of them. And it is precisely this coming short of the fact, and stating a part as if it were the whole, which makes the falseness of the analytic judgment.
§ 62. The fact, which is given us, is the total complex of qualities and relations which appear to sense. But what we assert of this given fact is, and can be, nothing but an ideal content. And it is evident at once that the idea we use can not possibly exhaust the full particulars of what we have before us. A description, we all know, can not ever reach to a complete account of the manifold shades, and the sensuous wealth of one entire moment of direct presentation. As soon as we judge, we are forced to analyze, and forced to dis tinguish. We must separate some elements of the given from others. We sunder and divide what appears to us as a sen sible whole. It is never more than an arbitrary selection which goes into the judgment. We say " There is a wolf," or " This tree is green; " but such poor abstractions, such mere bare meanings, are much less than the wolf and the tree which we see; and they fall even more short of the full particulars, the mass of inward and outward setting, from which we separate the wolf and the tree. If the real as it appears is = abcdefgh, then our judgment is nothing but X = a, or X = dr-b. But a-b by itself has never been given, and is not what appears. It was in the fact and we have taken it out. It was of the fact and we have given it independence. We have separated, divided, abridged, dissected, we have muti lated the given.* And we have done this arbitrarily: we have selected what we chose. But, if this is so, and if every analytic judgment must inevitably so alter the fact, how can it any longer lay claim to truth?
§ 63. No doubt we shall be told, " This is idle subtlety. The judgment does not copy the whole perception, but why should it do so? What it does say, and does reproduce, at all events is there. Fact is fact, and given is given. They do not cease to be such because something beside themselves exists. To maintain that ' There is a wolf ' is false, because an ab stract wolf is not given entirely by itself, is preposterous and ridiculous."
* Cf. here Lotze's admirable chapter, Logik, II. VIII.
CHAP. II FORMS OF JUDGMENT 95 And I am afraid that with some readers this will end the discussion. But to those who are willing to venture further, I would suggest as encouragement that a thing may seem ludicrous, not because it is at all absurd in itself, but because it conflicts with hardened prejudice. And it is a prejudice of this kind that we have now encountered.
§ 64. It is a very common and most ruinous superstition to suppose that analysis is no alteration, and that, whenever we distinguish, we have at once to do with divisible existence. It is an immense assumption to conclude, when a fact comes to us as a whole, that some parts of it may exist without any sort of regard for the rest. Such naive assurance of the outward reality of all mental distinctions, such touching con fidence in the crudest identity of thought and existence, is worthy of the school which so loudly appeals to the name of Experience. Boldly stated by Hume (cf. Book II. II. Chap. I. § 5)5 this cardinal principle of error and delusion has passed into the traditional practice of the school, and is believed too deeply to be discussed or now recognized. The protesta tions of fidelity to fact have been somewhat obtrusive, but self-righteous innocence and blatant virtue have served once more here to cover the commission of the decried offence in its deadliest form. If it is true in any sense (and I will not deny it) that thought in the end is the measure of things, yet at least this is false, that the divisions we make within a whole all answer to elements whose existence does not depend on the rest. It is wholly unjustifiable to take up a complex, to do any work we please upon it by analysis, and then simply predicate as an adjective of the given these results of our ab straction. These products were never there as such, and in saying, as we do, that as such they are there, we falsify the fact. You can not always apply in actual experience that coarse notion of the whole as the sum of its parts into which the school of " experience " so delights to torture phenomena. If it is wrong in physiology to predicate the results, that are reached by dissection, simply and as such of the living body, it is here infinitely more wrong. The whole that is given us is a continuous mass of perception and feeling; and to say of this whole, that any one element would be what it is there, when apart from the rest, is a very grave assertion. We 96 THE PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC BOOK I might have supposed it not quite self-evident, and that it was possible to deny it without open absurdity.* § 65. I should like to digress so far as to adduce two examples of error, which follow from the mistake we are now considering. When we ask " What is the composition of Mind," we break up that state, which comes to us as a whole, into units of feeling. But since it is clear that these units by themselves are not all the " composition," we are forced to recognize the existence of relations. But this does not stagger us. We push on with the conceptions we have brought to the work, and which of course can not be false, and we say, Oh yes, we have here some more units, naturally not quite the same as the others, and — voila tout. But when a sceptical reader, whose mind has been warped by a different education, attempts to form an idea of what is meant, he is somewhat at a loss. If units have to exist together, they must stand in relation to one another; and, if these relations are also units, it would seem that the second class must also stand in relation to the first. If A and B are feelings, and if C their relation is another feeling, you must either suppose that component parts can exist without standing in relation with one another, or else that there is a fresh relation between C and AB. Let this be D, and once more we are launched on the infinite process of finding a relation between D and C-AB; and so on for ever. If relations are facts that exist between facts, then what comes between the relations and the other facts? The real truth is that the units on one side, and on the other side the rela tion existing between them, are nothing actual.50 They are fictions of the mind, mere distinctions within a single reality, which a common delusion erroneonsly takes for independent facts. If we believe the assurance of a distinguished Pro fessor^ this burning faith in the absurd and the impossible, which was once the privilege and the boast of theology, can now not be acquired anywhere outside the sacred precincts of the laboratory. I am afraid it is difficult to adopt such an optimistic conclusion.
§ 66. And perhaps I may be pardoned if, by another illus- IIl!9F°r thC gCneral validity of Analysis and Abstraction see Book fVid. Huxley, Hume, pp. 52, 69.
CHAP. II FORMS OF JUDGMENT 97 tration, I venture to show how entirely the mind which is purified by science can think in accordance with orthodox Christianity.51 In the religious consciousness God and Man are elements that are given to us in connection. But, reflect ing on experience, we make distinctions, and proceed as above to harden these results of analysis into units. We thus have God as an unit on one side, and Man as an unit on the other: and then we are puzzled about their relation. The relation of course must be another unit, and we go on to find that we should like something else, to mediate once more, and go be tween this product and what we had at first. We fall at once into the infinite process, and, having taken up with poly theism, the length we go is not a matter of principle.
§ 67. To return to the analytic judgment. When I say " There is a wolf," the real fact is a particular wolf, not like any other, in relation to this particular environment and to my internal self, which is present in a particular condition of feeling emotion and thought. Again, when I say " I have a toothache," the fact once more is a particular ache in a certain tooth, together with all my perceptions and feelings at that given moment. The question is, when I take in my judg ment one fragment of the whole, have I got the right to predicate this of the real, and to assert " It, as it is, is a fact of sense"? Now I am not urging that the analytic judgment is in no sense true. I am saying that, if you take it as asserting the existence of its content as given fact, your procedure is unwarranted. And I ask, on what principle do you claim the right of selecting what you please from the presented whole and treating that fragment as an actual quality? It certainly does not exist by itself, and how do you know that, when put by itself, it could be a quality of this reality? The sensible phenomenon is what it is, and is all that it is; and anything less than itself must surely be something else. A fraction of the truth, here as often elsewhere, becomes entire falsehood, because it is used to qualify the whole.
§ 68. The analytic judgment is not true per se. It can not stand by itself. Asserting, as it does, of the particular presentation, it must always suppose a further content, which falls outside that fraction it affirms. What it says is true, if 98 THE PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC BOOK I true at all, because of something else. The fact it states is really fact only in relation to the rest of the context, and only because of the rest of that context. It is not true except under that condition. So we have a judgment which is really conditioned, and which is false if you take it as categorical. To make it both categorical and true, you must get the con dition inside the judgment. You must take up the given as it really appears, without omission, unaltered, and un- mutilated. And this is impossible.
§ 69. For ideas are not adequate to sensible perception, and, beyond this obstacle, there are further difficulties.52 The real, which appears within the given, can not possibly be con fined to it. Within the limit of its outer edges its character gives rise to the infinite process in space and time. Seeking there for the simple, at the end of our search we still are confronted by the composite and relative. And the outer edges themselves are fluent. They pass for ever in time and space into that which is outside them. It is true that the actual light we see falls only upon a limited area; but the continuity of the element, the integrity of the context, forbids us to say that this illuminated section by itself is real. The reference of the content to something other than itself lies deep within its internal nature. It proclaims itself to be adjectival, to be relative to the outside; and we violate its essence if we try to assert it as having existence entirely in its own right. Space and time have been said to be " prin ciples of individuation." It would be truer to say they are principles of relativity. They extend the real just as much as they confine it.
I do not mean that past and future are actually given, and that they come within the circle of presentation. I mean that, although they can not be given, the given would be de stroyed by their absence. If real with them, it would not be given; and, given without them, it is for ever incomplete and therefore unreal. The presented content is, in short, not compatible with its own presentation. It involves a contra diction, and might at once on that ground be declared to be unreal. But it is better here to allow it free course, and to suffer it to develope by an impossible consequence its inherent unsoundness.
CHAP. II FORMS OF JUDGMENT gg § 70. We saw that you can not ascribe to the real one part of what is given in present perception. And now we must go further. Even if you could predicate the whole present content, yet still you would fail unless you asserted also both the past and the future. You can not assume (or I, at least, do not know your right to assume) that the present exists independent of the past, and that, taking up one fragment of the whole extension, you may treat this part as self-subsistent, as something that owes nothing to its connection with the rest. If your judgment is to be true as well as categorical, you must get the conditions entirely within it. And here the conditions are the whole extent of spaces and times which are required to make the given complete. The difficulty is insuperable. It is not merely that ideas can not copy facts of sense. It is not merely that our understandings are limited, that we do not know the whole of the series, and that our powers are inadequate to apprehend so large an object. No possible mind could represent to itself the completed series of space and time; since, for that to happen, the infinite process must have come to an end, and be realized in a finite result. And this can not be. It is not merely inconceivable psycho logically; it is metaphysically impossible.
§ 71. Our analytical judgments are hence all either false or conditioned. " But conditioned/' I may be told, " is a doubtful phrase. After all it is not the same as hypothetical. A thing is conditioned on account of a supposal, but on the other hand it is conditioned by a fact. We have here the difference between ' if ' and * because.' 53 When a statement is true in consequence of the truth of another statement, they both are categorical." I quite admit the importance of the distinction, and must recur to it hereafter (Chap. VII. § 10). But I deny its relevancy for our present purpose.
The objection rests on the following contention. " Ad mitted that in the series of phenomena every element is relative to the rest and is because of something else, yet for all that the judgment may be categorical. The something else, though we are unable to bring it within the judgment, though we can not in the end ever know it at all and realize it in thought, is, for all that, fact. And, this being so, the state ment is true; since it rests in the end, not at all on an ' if ' IOO THE PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC BOOK I but upon a ' because/ which, although unknown, is none the less real. Let the analytic judgment admit its relativity, let