Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/567

Rh groupings of Abstrakte Vorstellungen. These in their turn are formed, held, and communicated under the influence of language. Thinking, however, is judging concerning these results of our experience and of our apperceptive process. In what does this act of judgment consist? Erdmann replies: Not in bringing together already formed ideas and uniting them two and two by a fresh "function of unity"; not in subsuming one under another; not in uniting mere names of things; not even in identifying ideas, nor yet in sundering ideas already united. On the contrary, the Wahrnehmungsurtheil, the simplest case of all, already typifies (p. 205) the essential nature of the process of judgment. When I say, This paper is four-cornered, I do not sunder the object of my sight into two thought-objects; nor do I bring into a new union two significant ideas before sundered. Neither mere analysis nor mere synthesis takes place here. But (p. 203) while the paper remains all the while just as it is for my consciousness, I bring in succession ideas of words, Wortvorstellungen, into my mind, and observe that two of these words, i.e. the pair in the compound four-cornered, express a meaning which in this or that respect is identical with some of the facts already presented in my one and indivisible perception of the paper. My perception then is, if you will, a synthesis in experience, a Verflechtung, of many perceptual facts. Into the unity of this perception my thought introduces, according to Erdmann's theory, no sundering whatever. What was united in the Vorstellung before I judged, remains united while I judge, and stays united afterwards. The new thing that happens while I judge is for the first a Vorstellungsverlauf, consisting of words. I observe meanwhile that these words express meanings which are identical with something that is already immanent in the perceptive unity itself. My judgment is thus a comment in successive Wortvorstellungen upon what already coexists in unity in the subject of my judgment. As such a comment my judgment finds predicates for this subject, but does not change the content of the latter.

The "predicative relation" is in general thus typified. The predicate is in meaning discovered to be immanent in the subject. This discovery is what the judgment accomplishes. The predicate is represented by a Wortvorstellung, which in so far comes to the subject from without. Yet the act of judgment does not create, but only finds the unity of the subject and predicate idea, and finds this unity as having been already existent in the subject before the judgment was made. Here is then some indication of what Erdmann means by his Gleichheitsbeziehung der Einordnung, which one may freely translate as the "discovery of an identity between the meaning of the predicate and a portion of the meaning already immanent in the subject."

The relation of this view of the thinking process to Erdmann's former