Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/140

 128 F. H. BRADLEY'S PIUXCIPLES OF LOGIC. of judgment, which err either by abstractly isolating the factors of the judgment or by accepting part for the whole. Such, e.g., are all definitions of judgment as comparison of ideas, under which fall the current explanations of judging as referring to a class, as asserting identity of subject and predicate, or definitions which are merely adequate or inadequate psychological theorems. The criticisms here are to the point and felicitously expressed. The discussion of the more abstruse questions regarding the judgment is led up to from the familiar doctrine that in a categorical judgment, existence of either subject or predicate is not asserted. ' All S is P ' by no means forces the assertor to the admission that either S or P exists. S and P are merely ideal contents, and the judgment is no more than the statement that these are so connected that if the one, then the other as qualified by the first. Difficulties of this kind have recently begun to find their way into our current logical discussions, not without most hopeful results. 1 Clearly, if a solution is to come at all, and is to affect our distribution of logical judgments, it must be arrived at by a more profound consideration of the reference to reality that has appeared as a constituent of the judgment. Mr. Bradley advances to the task by contrasting in a general way the characteristics of reality and truth. The real is individual, self-existent, substantival. Truth on the other hand as having to do with the idea has no one of these characteristics. At first sight, then, it would seem that all truth is hypothetical merely, that it expresses only well or ill founded connexions of ideal contents in our minds. To come closer to the problem, there is introduced a provisional classification of categorical assertions, into (1) analytic judgments of sense, in which the given is merely described by one of its parts, (2) synthetic judgments of sense, in which the real of sense-perception, involved in the assertion, transcends what is immediately given, (3) those in which the real referred to is not a fact of perception. Scrutiny of these yields as result the important principles, that the real, even when taken in the sense of the real in perception, is not identical with its momentary appearance in perception, said momentary appear- ance, indeed, being an incognisable atom when taken in isolation ; that the real, taken in more or less limited fashion, is ideally determined and directly referred to in the analytic judgments ; that the real is indirectly referred to in synthetic judgments and is in them taken to be a continuous identity underlying the momentary phenomenal appearance. All such judgments are singular and appear to be categorical, to imply assertion of the real and of its elements as appearing in the judgment. Universal abstract judgments and hypothetical, on the other hand, appear to assert merely necessary connexion of ideal content, and there- 1 See, e.g., Mr. Venn in Symbolic Logic, and Mr. A. Sidgwick's very " thoughtful treatment of Abstract and Concrete Propositions in Fallacies.