Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/291

272 now merely represent it. The Truth that we pursue is no longer, indeed, the Independent Being of Realism; but it still remains something defined as not our ideas, and as that to which they ought to correspond, so that their internal meanings, interesting as these may seem, appear the mere by-play, so to speak, of the business of truth-seeking. And that business seems to be the task of submitting our thought to what is not our own mere thought. Well, for the time, we must still accept this situation. And, while we do so, let us examine briefly our processes of judgment, in so far as these consciously refer to external Objects; and let us endeavor to observe how our judgments, as they occur in actual thinking, or are confirmed or refuted by our ordinary experience, seem to view their own relation to Reality. To turn in this direction is to seek help, if you please, from Formal Logic. For Formal Logic is the doctrine that treats of our judgments and of their ordinary meanings as we make and combine them.

Ordinary judgments, all of them, as we have just said, make some sort of reference to Reality. Never do you judge at all, unless you suppose yourself to be asserting something about a real world. You can express doubt as to whether a certain ideal object has its place in Reality. You can deny that some class of ideal objects is real. You can affirm the Being of this or of that object. But never can you judge without some sort of conscious intention to be in significant relation to the Real. The what and the that are, indeed, easily distinguished, so long as you take the distinction abstractly enough. But never, when you seriously judge in actual thinking, do you