Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/371

 HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 355 indefensible, impulse to believe that in other instances, as yet untested, the presence of one of these qualities will be a mark of the presence of the other. Their answer is that it is found in practice that to trust to this impulse produces on the whole useful results, and that, indeed, if we did not trust to it, it would be impossible to live at all. Now it has, no doubt, been found in the past that such inferences, if made with certain precautions, will in many cases be useful. But why should this cause us to trust them in the future? Only if we make an inference from the utility of some inferences in the past to the utility of other inferences in the -future. And thus our attempt to give a merely practical value to inference breaks down, since we cannot do it unless we admit one inference at the least to be logically defensible. To return from this digression the simplest form which the Law of Nature can assume will be the Categorical ; for example, " The lion is a mammal ". The proposition, it will be noticed, is exactly the same in its external form as that of any other Categorical Judgment. It differs from the latter only in the implication that it is one of those Judgments, which we have now seen must exist, which are true, not as deductions from any other, but in their own right. As know- ledge advances many propositions, which were once accepted as ultimate, and considered to be Laws of Nature, are found to be deducible from others, and lose that title. Our con- viction that a certain Judgment deserves to rank among ultimate Laws is generally only negative i.e. it rests on our inability, for the present at any rate, to find a more funda- mental Judgment on which to base it. Hypothetical Laws. This transition is exactly the same as the corresponding one under the head of the Judgment of Necessity. All Categorical Judgments have their Hypothetical equivalents, which are true if the Categorical Judgments are true, and this applies, of course, to those ultimate Judgments which are called Laws of Nature. If it is an ultimate truth that the lion is a mammal, it is also an ultimate truth that, if any- thing possesses the qualities which define a lion, it will be a mammal. Disjunctive Laws. Here, too, the transition is the same as in Judgments of Necessity. Since the various Universals have between them