Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/197

 HEGEL'S TREATMENT OP THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 181 can be independent of Positive Judgments, and as an Infinite Judgment is impossible, we shall be compelled, if we have Judgments of Inherence at all, to have Positive Judgments among others. But Positive Judgments of Inherence we have seen to be impossible. We must therefore discover, if possible, some higher standpoint which will deliver us from Judgments of Inherence altogether. Our difficulty has arisen from the inevitable incompati- bility of the Subject and Predicate in Judgments of Inherence. How can this be changed ? Obviously the predicate must remain a Universal. For if riot, it could never connect the subject with anything else, and so could never assist in determining it. It is not, however, inevitable that the subject must be one Individual. It is possible that a predicate should be asserted of more than one Individual at once, whether these are simply enumerated, or denned by means of a second Universal. We must avail ourselves of this, therefore, and endeavour to determine some form of subject which is compatible with a Universal for a predicate. This will introduce, for the first time, the conception of Quantity in Judgments. In Judgments of Inherence, the quantity is always Singular, or rather the distinction of Singular, Particular, and Universal is unknown. (Particular and Universal Judgments must not, of course, be confused with Particular and Universal Notions in Judgments. Thus Some men are good is a Particular Judgment with two Universal Notions in it.) But now we are going to take as oar subject a varying number of Individuals, and the dis- tinctions of quantity will consequently arise. Another result of the advance is that the fixed point, if we may so call it, in the Judgment has been changed. In the Judgment of Inherence the subject was the datum and the problem was to provide it with a predicate. Here, on the contrary, the predicate is the datum. We have to find a subject to which it will apply. Instead of saying that a certain predicate is one of those which belong to a given subject, we say that a certain subject is one of those which possesses a given predicate. It is for this reason because these Judgments are best expressed as bringing their subjects under their predicates that they are called Judgments of Subsumption.