Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/196

 180 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAET : Transition to Subsumption. 1 The Negative Judgment, however, cannot help us. We have adopted it as an escape from the Positive, and it will not work without the Positive. Of every Individual there is no doubt that many Universals can be denied. Otherwise, if all Universals could be affirmed of all Individuals, the Indi- viduals would not be in the least unlike one another, which we have seen to be impossible. But, on the other hand, if all Universals could be denied of any Individual, that Indi- vidual would be completely dissimilar to every other Indi- vidual, which we have also seen to be impossible. Negative Judgments cannot exist without Positive, and cannot, there- fore, take their place. As Hegel points out, all the interest of a Judgment which denies a Universal, A, of an Individual, is dependent on a wider Judgment which affirms of the Individual some Universal, B, which is compatible with A. Thus the pro- position " The elephant is not carnivorous " is interesting because the elephant is a mammal, and some mammals are carnivorous. The proposition " The oak is not carnivorous " is less interesting, and still less interesting, though equally true, is the proposition " The moral ideal is not carnivorous ". Hegel, however, seems to me to weaken his case by saying that such propositions as these his example is " The mind is no elephant " are examples of the Infinite Judgment, " in which we are presented with the total incompatibility of the subject and the predicate ". 2 For in that case true, though trivial, Negative Judgments could exist independently of Positive Judgments. But no proposition can be a completely Infinite Judgment, since that would imply that there was no Universal in common between the Individual who is the subject of the Judgment, and those Individuals of whom the predicate could be affirmed. And this is an impossible supposition, for, as we have seen, nothing can be completely dissimilar to anything else. In Hegel's example, a mind resembles an elephant though not closely. For example, they both exist in time. As no Negative Judgment, except an Infinite Judgment, 1 My difference from Hegel at this point I believe to be little more than verbal (see Note B). It has compelled me, however, to find a new name for the Synthesis. As this synthesis states, in a general form, the idea worked out in the next triad, I have called it " Transition to Subsumption " upon the analogy of the " Transition to Essence " in the Greater Logic (Werke, iii., p. 466). 2 Enc., section 173.