Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/18

2 considered as terms in an actual or possible judgment. The student of elementary logic is asked (e.g., by Jevons) to describe the logical character of such terms as "metropolis," "book," "library," "prime minister," etc. It is a puzzling question to set to beginners, who are always apt to think that every ques- tion must have one and only one correct answer. The same term, i.e., what looks the same when stated in isolation, may be singular or general, collective or distributive, according to the context in which it comes. " The Library is in this street," "This book is not in the Library," " It is not in any library." Here what we call the same term "library" is singular, collec- tive, general, in succession ; and in the last example is either general or collective according as we are thinking of the " any " or the "in." Aristotle's definition of the term, nay the very word 'term,' suggests that the term is the element of a proposition : opov S /cao) et? ov SLaXverat, 77 Tr/ooVacrt? (An. Pr., I, l). "The term (terminus = limit, end) is that into which the proposition is broken up when we analyze it." The two sides of a sheet of paper have no existence apart from the sheet of paper ; but they may certainly be considered separately from it and from one another. Is not a similar abstract procedure permissible in logic ? Aristotle has been unduly blamed for adopting in the De Interpretation the concept as his starting point, and building up the judgment out of concepts. But we may rea- sonably suppose that, taking for granted the definition of the Analytics (which was an earlier work), he considered himself at liberty, as in the sciences, to show how to construct a whole in thought out of elements that have only been arrived at by a process of abstraction. It should be observed further that, in the passage in the De Interpretation, his object is to show that the isolated concept is neither true nor false, that only the judgment is the real unit of thought. The very passage in which he is supposed to lapse into an erroneous view of the term .is one in which he is practically asserting the logical priority of the judgment. But here, as elsewhere, the disciples have shown a peculiar facility for overlooking the more impor-