Part 35

Vol. I, p. 38.

Vol. I, p. 13; last italics mine.

Vol. I, p. 14; italics mine.

See Vol. I, pp. 16-20. On p. 22 this work is declared to be not only the first, but the most indispensable of all thought's operations.

Vol. I, p. 26.

Vol. I, p. 35.

Vol. I, p. 36; see the strong statements already quoted, p. 30. What if this canon were applied in the first act of thought referred to above: the original objectification which transforms the mere state into an abiding quality or meaning? Suppose, that is, it were said that the first objectifying act cannot make a substantial (or attached) quale out of a mere state of feeling; it must find the distinction it makes there already! It is clear we should at once get a regressus ad infinitum. We here find Lotze face to face with this fundamental dilemma: thought either arbitrarily forces in its own distinctions, or else just repeats what is already there--is either falsifying or futile. This same contradiction, so far as it affects the impression, has already been discussed. See p. 31.

Vol. I, p. 31.

As we have already seen, the concept, the meaning as such, is always a factor or status in a reflective situation; it is always a predicate of judgment, in use in interpreting and developing the logical subject, or datum of perception. See Study VII, on the Hypothesis.

ROYCE, in his World and Individual, Vol. I, chaps. 6 and 7, has criticised the conception of meaning as valid, but in a way which implies that there is a difference between validity and reality, in the sense that the meaning or content of the valid idea becomes real only when it is experienced in direct feeling. The above implies, of course, a difference between validity and reality, but finds the test of validity in exercise of the function of direction or control to which the idea makes pretension or claim. The same point of view would profoundly modify Royce's interpretation of what he terms "inner" and "outer" meaning. See MOORE, The University of Chicago Decennial Publications, Vol. III, on "Existence, Meaning, and Reality."

Vol. II, pp. 257, 265 and in general Book III, chap. 4. It is significant that thought itself, appearing as an act of thinking over against its own content, is here treated as psychical. Even this explicit placing of thinking in the psychical sphere, along with sensations and the associative mechanism, does not, however, lead Lotze to reconsider his statement that the psychological problem is totally irrelevant and even corrupting as regards the logical. Consequently, as we see in the text, it only gives him one more difficulty to wrestle with: how a process which is ex officio purely psychical and subjective can yet yield results which are valid, in a logical, to say nothing of an ontological, sense.

Professor James's satisfaction in the contemplation of bare pluralism, of disconnection, of radical having-nothing-to-do-with-one-another, is a case in point. The satisfaction points to an æsthetic attitude in which the brute diversity becomes itself one interesting object; and thus unity asserts itself in its own denial. When discords are hard and stubborn, and intellectual and practical unification are far to seek, nothing is commoner than the device of securing the needed unity by recourse to an emotion which feeds on the very brute variety. Religion and art and romantic affection are full of examples.

Lotze even goes so far in this connection as to say that the antithesis between our ideas and the objects to which they are directed is itself a part of the world of ideas (Vol. II, p. 192). Barring the phrase "world of ideas" (as against world of continuous experiencing) he need only have commenced at this point to have traveled straight and arrived somewhere. But it is absolutely impossible to hold both this view and that of the original independent existence of something given to and in thought and an independent existence of a thought-activity, thought-forms, and thought-contents.

The criticism of Bosanquet's theory of the judgment offered in this paper is from the standpoint of the theory of the judgment developed by Professor John Dewey, in his lectures on "The Theory of Logic." While the chief interest of the paper, as the title implies, is critical, it has been necessary to devote a portion of it to the exposition of the point of view from which the criticism is made.--H. B. T.

The references throughout this paper are to the pages of Vol. I of BERNARD BOSANQUET, Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge, Oxford, 1888.

F. H. BRADLEY, Principles of Logic, p. 64.

The difficulty, of course, is not a merely formal one, much less a verbal one. Instinctively we grant to Bosanquet his statement that reality is a continuous whole; we feel it almost captious to question his right to it. But why? Because the content of judgment is continuous; judgment is always engaged with the determination of a related totality. But if all content is ideal, and judgment is just the application of this content to reality in virtue of an isolated contact, surely it begs the entire question to say that reality apart from the content applied is continuous, and then to use this assertion to justify the objective validity of the judgment--its element of permanent truth.

There is good reason for believing that Mr. Bosanquet escapes, in his own mind, the difficulty by the term "correspondence." "The name stands for these elements in the idea which correspond in the separate worlds;" we may even be accused of injustice in confusing this correspondence with bare identity of existence. But if one idea corresponds to another in the sense of referring to it, what is this but the fact to be explained--how an existence can refer beyond itself?

This conclusion is clearly recognized by BRADLEY, Appearance and Reality, chap. 4.

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.

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.

Or, the situation as questioned is itself a fact, and a perfectly determinate (though not determined) one. See pp. 38, 50.

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.

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.

Logik, p. 304.

DE MORGAN, Budget of Paradoxes, pp. 55, 56; quoted by WELTON, Logic, Vol. II, p. 60.

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.

This carries with it, of course, the notion that "sensation" and "image" are not distinct psychical existences in themselves, but are distinguished logical forces.