Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/427

402 so cannot, in this thought at least, be making blunders about it? But in so far as the thing symbolized is, through the symbol, in one’s thought, why is it not known, and so correctly judged? All this involves that old question of the nature of symbols. They are to mean for us more than we know that they mean. How can that be? No doubt ail that is really possible, but how?

We follow our difficulty into another department. Let us attempt a sort of provisional psychological description of a judgment as a state of mind. So regarded, a judgment is simply a fact that occurs in somebody’s thought. If we try to describe it as an occurrence, without asking whence it came, we shall perhaps find in it three elements, — elements which are in some fashion described in Ueberweg’s well-known definition of a judgment as the “Consciousness about the objective validity of a subjective union of ideas.” Our interpretation of them shall be this: The elements are: The Subject, with the accompanying shade of curiosity about it; the Predicate, with the accompanying sense of its worth in satisfying a part of our curiosity about the subject; and the Sense of Dependence, whereby we feel the value of this act to lie, not in itself, but in its agreement with a vaguely felt Beyond, that stands out there as Object.

Now this analysis of the elements of a judgment is no explanation of our difficulties; and in fact for