Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/573

 LEON BEUNSCHVICG, La ModciliU du Jugeinent. 557 practical ; the judgment of recognition (constatation} gives us the notion of priority, and the judgment of action gives us the notion of posteriority ' (p. 239). He then adds a note to warn us, that he is not here concerned ' with deducing the parts of time, but merely with showing the correlation of those parts with the different forms of judgment'. Yet he immediately goes on to say that the doc- trine ' that it is the distinction of judgments which gives us the means of understanding and basing the division of the parts of time 'is 'in no way paradoxical,' as if that were what he was concerned with ; and in the text, after objecting to Aristotle for holding that ' the nature of time was the justification of the different modalities,' he goes on to assert that ' inasmuch as past and future are the object of the judgment, they cannot have the same title to existence as the judgment itself. Now what I should like to ask of M. Brunschvicg, is whether a mere ' corre- lation ' of the parts of time with the forms of judgment would give him the right not only to contradict Aristotle, but also to assert that time has not the same title to existence as the judgment, and that the latter is in some way the ' basis ' of time. He seems to admit no alternative between ' deducing ' one from the other, and merely correlating them ; and yet he persists in regarding them as somehow on a different level. It is needless to say that this strange relation, for which his system leaves no place, is just w r hat most people mean by ' logical dependence ' : M. Brunschvicg is trying to show that the judgment is logically ' prior ' to time. But naturally he can find no way of saying so, since he regards judgments as nothing but ' acts,' or ' successive moments of in- tellectual activity,' and those moments 'really' successive too (p. 238). He holds that a ' Dialectic ' such as Hegel's is con- demned, because its stages must be homogeneous, and all stages being necessarily ' successive,' the only homogeneity possible for them must be that of abstract time ; and we have no right to abstract. In short, he manages to collect within the space of these few pages an almost incredible complication of self-contra- dictory nonsense. We may notice, in passing, that, in the note above referred to, he reaches the conclusion that ' the conscious- ness of the spontaneous life which unrolls itself through the moments of time, implies a centre of reflexion which does not elapse with the course of time ' ; whereas it is his fundamental ob- jection to Descartes' ' Je pense, done je suis,' that ' thought' only warrants the affirmation of itself, not of any ' unity ' such as the 'I'. Has, then, this 'centre of reflexion' no unity; or is it the same thing as the ' reflexion ' of which it is the centre ? Again, although, as we have seen, he maintains in his first chapter that only a knowledge of knowledge can be an ' integral ' knowledge, such as philosophy must be, he justifies his considera- tion of the modality of practical judgments in chapter v. by telling us that ' the truth of a philosophic conception scarcely allows of any other criterion than the integrality ' (if I may revive the