  Title: The Essentials of Logic Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and Inference Author: Bernard Bosanquet Language: English Produced by Gdurb THE ESSENTIALS OF LOGIC by BERNARD BOSANQUET FORMERLY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORDMACMILLAN AND CO. LONDON AND NEW YORK 1895 The right of Translation is reserved Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been placed under the paragraphs to which they relate. A few added footnotes and additions to Bosanquet's footnotes, giving the equivalents of Greek words in the text, are in square brackets. Bosanquet's marginal notes have been used as subheadings. Page numbers from the original are in braces {}. {v} PREFACEIn this course of lectures I have attempted to carry out, under the freer conditions of the University Extension system, a purpose conceived many years ago at Oxford. It was suggested to me by the answer of a friend, engaged like myself from time to time in teaching elementary Logic, to the question which I put to him, “What do you aim at in teaching Logic to beginners? What do you think can reasonably be hoped for?” “If the men could learn what an Inference is, it would be something,” was the reply. The course of lectures which I now publish was projected in the spirit thus indicated. Though only the two last discourses deal explicitly with Inference, yet those which precede them contribute, I hope, no less essentially, to explain the nature of that single development which in some stages we call Judgment, and in others Inference. So far as I could see, the attempt to go to the heart of the subject, however imperfectly executed, was appreciated by the students, and was rewarded with a serious attention which would not have been commanded by the trivialities of formal Logic, although more entertaining and less abstruse. The details of traditional terminology may be found in Jevons’s Elementary Lessons in Logic (Macmillan). Those {vi} who desire to pursue the study more in the sense of the present work, may be referred above all to Bradley’s Principles of Logic, and also to Lotze’s Logic (E. Tr.), and to Sigwart’s great work on Logic, the English translation of which, just completed, opens a storehouse of knowledge and robust good sense to the English student. My own larger Logic expresses in extenso the views which these lectures set out in a shorter form. I hope it will be admitted by my critics that this experiment, whether successful or unsuccessful, was worth making, and that except in the University Extension system, it could not easily have been made. Bernard Bosanquet. {vii} CONTENTSLECTURE I THE PROBLEM OF LOGIC1. Difficulty of the Science 1 2. The Problem stated 3 3. World as Idea 4 4. “World” 5 5. The Animal’s World 6 6. The World as “Objective” 7 i. Common sense 8 ii. Common-sense Theory 8 iii. Philosophic Theory 11 7. Our separate “Worlds” 14 8. Subjective Idealism 19 LECTURE II JUDGMENT AS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF A WORLD1. Defect of Subjective Idealism 21 2. The World as Knowledge 22 3. Knowledge is in the form of Judgment 23 a. Necessary 23 b. Universal 26 c. Constructive 27 4. The Continuous Affirmation of Waking Consciousness 33 5. Comparison with World as Will 37 6. Distribution of Attention 40 {viii} LECTURE III THE RELATION OF LOGIC TO KNOWLEDGE1. Meaning of “Form” 42 2. Form of Knowledge dependent on Content 49 3. The Relation of Part and Whole as Form determined by Content 54 4. Nature of Knowledge 58 5. Conclusion 59 LECTURE IV TYPES OF JUDGMENT, AND THE GENERAL CONDITIONS INVOLVED IN ASSERTION1. Correspondence between Types of Judgment and Nature of Objects as Knowledge 61 a. Impersonal Judgment 61 b. Perceptive Judgment 62 c. Proper Names in Judgment 64 d. Abstract Judgment 65 2. The General Definition of Judgment 66 LECTURE V THE PROPOSITION AND THE NAME1. Judgment translated into Language 80 2. Proposition and Sentence 82 3. Difference between Proposition and Judgment 82 4. “Parts of Speech” 85 5. Denotation and Connotation 88 6. Have Proper Names Connotation? 91 7. Inverse Ratio of Connotation and Denotation 94 {ix} LECTURE VI PARTS OF THE JUDGMENT, AND ITS UNITY1. Parts of the Judgment 98 2. Copula 99 3. Are Subject and Predicate necessary? 100 4. Two Ideas or Things 101 5. Distinction between Subject and Predicate 107 LECTURE VII THE CATEGORICAL AND THE HYPOTHETICAL JUDGMENTS1. Some Criticisms on the ordinary scheme of 2. Which Judgments are Categorical? 116 LECTURE VIII NEGATION, AND OPPOSITION OF JUDGMENTS1. Distinction between Contrary and Contradictory Opposition 126 2. Contrary Negation 128 3. Why use Negation? 130 4. Stage of Significant Negation; Combination of Contrary and Contradictory 132 5. Negative Judgment expressing Fact 134 6. Operation of the Denied Idea 135 {x} LECTURE IX INFERENCE AND THE SYLLOGISTIC FORMS1. Inference in General 137 2. Conditions of the Possibility of Inference 139 3. System the ultimate condition of Inference 140 4. Immediate Inference 141 5. Number of Instances 142 6. Figures of Syllogism, illustrating Progress from Guess-work to Demonstration 146 LECTURE X INDUCTION, DEDUCTION, AND CAUSATION1. Induction 151 a. By simple Enumeration 151 b. Enumeration always has a Ground 152 c. Perfect Induction 152 d. System 153 e. Analogy as Step towards System 155 f. Negative Instance 158 g. Classification and Generalisation 159 h. Hypothesis 161 2. Deduction 162 a. Subsumption 163 b. Construction 163 3. Causation 164 4. The Postulate of Knowledge 165 5. Conclusion 166 {1} LECTURE I THE PROBLEM OF LOGICDifficulty of the science 1. There is no science more difficult than that on which we are entering in these lectures. It is worth while to discuss the nature of this difficulty. It is a question of interest rather than of intricacy. All sciences have, perhaps, much the same possibilities of broad theory and subtle analysis. But Logic stands alone in the difficulty with which the student sustains his persuasion that its point of view is worth applying. In most other sciences, even in the philosophical sciences, there is a continual stimulus to sense-perception, to curiosity, to human interest. The learner is called upon to dissect animals or plants, to undertake delicate manipulations with beautifully contrived instruments, to acquaint himself with the history of nations, with the genesis of worlds, with strange and novel speculations upon the nature of space, or with the industry and well-being of various classes among mankind at the present day. And these elements of novelty, these stimulations of sense-perception or of practical interest, carry us forward imperceptibly, and sustain our {2} eagerness to analyse and combine in theoretic completeness the novel matter thus constantly impinging upon us. In Philosophy, and more especially in Logic, we can promise little or nothing of this kind. The teacher of Philosophy, from Socrates downwards, has talked about common things, things already familiar to his hearers. And although he calls upon them to think of these things in a peculiar way, and from an unaccustomed point of view, yet it is likely to be felt that he is demanding a new effort, without supplying a new interest. And it is a common experience, that after a time the mind rebels against this artificial attitude, which fatigues without instructing, if we have accustomed ourselves to understand by instruction the accumulation of new sense-perceptions and the extension of historical or scientific vision over a wider superficial area. Now this I cannot help, and I will not disguise. In Philosophy, and in Logic above all, it must be so. The whole point and meaning of the study is that in it we re-traverse familiar ground, and survey it by unfamiliar processes. We do not, except accidentally, so much as widen our mental horizon. For those who care to understand, to trace the connecting principles and functions that permeate our intellectual world, there is indeed an interest of a peculiar kind. But even experienced students will occasionally feel the strain of attending to difficult distinctions, entirely without the excitement of novelty in sense-perception or of a practical bearing upon human life. It is this that makes Logic probably the hardest of all the sciences. {3} The problem stated 2. We cannot hope to vanquish this difficulty unless we face it boldly from the first. There are in the old-fashioned Logic-books tricks and puzzles, fallacies and repartees, which can in some degree be made amusing; but of these I do not intend to speak. The course by which alone I can hope honestly to awaken a true logical interest among any who may be quite unfamiliar with the subject, is to approach the matter descriptively, and try to set before you fully and fairly what the problem is which the process of knowledge has to meet. And then it may be possible to claim a genuine theoretical curiosity—none the less genuine that it may be tinged with a sympathy for man’s common birthright of intelligence—for the detailed explanation of the means by which this problem is solved from day to day. Such an explanation is the science of Logic. The problem may be thus introduced. Several of those present have, I believe, attended a previous course of lectures on Psychology. They have learned, I presume, to think of the mind as the course of consciousness, a continuous connected presentation, more or less emphasising within it various images, and groups of images and ideas, which may be roughly said to act and re-act upon each other, to cohere in systems, and to give rise to the perception of self. This course of consciousness, including certain latent elements, the existence of which it is necessary to assume, is an individual mind, attached to a particular body, and so far as we know, not separable from the actions and affections of that body. What is the connection between such a course of consciousness in any individual, and the world as that individual knows and wills it? This is the point at {4} which Psychology passes into Logic. Psychology treats of the course of ideas and feelings; Logic of the mental construction of reality. How does the course of my private ideas and feelings contain in it, for me, a world of things and persons which are not merely in my mind? World as Idea 3. Schopenhauer called his great work, The World as Will and Idea. [1] Leaving out Will for the moment, let us consider the world “as Idea.” “‘The world is my idea;’ [2] this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as an idea, i.e. only in relation to something else, the consciousness which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this; for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, space, or causality, for they all pre-suppose it. ….. “No truth, therefore, is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of {5} what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.” [1] E. Tr. (Trubner, 1883). [2] Schopenhauer, op. cit. beginning. The world, then, for each of us, exists in the medium of our mind. It is a sort of building, of which the materials are our ideas and perceptions. The “world” 4. So much for “idea.” What do we mean by “world”? A succession of images passing before us, or rather making up our consciousness, like a dream, is not a world. The term is very expressive; it is a favourite word in Shakespeare. When the courtier says — “Hereafter, in a better world than this, he does not mean, as I used to think, “in heaven”; he means in a better condition of social affairs. In “mad world, mad kings, mad composition,” the term means more especially the set of political and family connections within which extraordinary reversals of behaviour have just taken place. Often we use the expression, with a qualifying epithet, to indicate some particular sphere of connected action, “the ecclesiastical world,” “the political world,” and so forth. Always there seems to be implied the notion of a set of things or persons bound together by some common quality which enables them to act upon each other, and to constitute what is technically termed a “whole.” The “world” par excellence, then, ought to mean the one connected set of things and persons which we all recognise {6} and refer to as the same, and as including ourselves along with all who use the word in the same sense. Then the “world as idea” means no less than this, that the system of things and persons which surrounds all of us, and which each of us speaks of and refers to as the same for every one, exists for each of us as something built up in his own mind—the mind attached to his own body—and out of the material of his own mind. The animal’s world 5. Let us illustrate this building up by thinking of the world, our surroundings, as an animal must be aware of it. The lowest beginnings of sight, for example, give no colour and no shape. An animal in this stage can, probably, only just take warning if a dark object comes between him and the light. Therefore he cannot have the ordered visual image of space definitely stretching away all round him, which is the primary basis of our idea of a world. He can move, no doubt, but there is nothing to make us suppose that he records and co-ordinates the results of his movements into anything like that permanent order of objects which must be constructed in some way by a human being even though born blind. Succession, we might say, is much more powerful with animals than co-existence; but we should have to guard ourselves against supposing that this was what we mean by succession, that is, a process definitely recognised as in time, with a connection of some reasonable kind between its phases. For the most part with animals out of sight is out of mind; if so, the present is not interpreted, enlarged, and arranged with reference to what is not present in time or space by them as it is by us. And therefore the consciousness of a single system of things, {7} permanent, and distinct from the momentary presentations of the senses, cannot, in all probability, grow up for them. If so, they have no real world, but only a dream world, [1] i.e. a world not contrasted with the stream of presentation, nor taken as the common theatre of all actions and events. This difference between the world of an animal and that of a human being, is a rough measure of what man does by mental or intellectual construction in making his world. [1] The character of the sensory powers, which are strongest in many animals, contributes to this conclusion. Mr. F.H. Bradley is sure that his dog’s system of logic, if he had one, would run, “What exists smells; what does not smell is nothing.” The sense of smell can scarcely give rise to the idea of a world of objects. It has hardly any capacity of structural discernment. The world as objective 6. We have now got the idea of a “world,” as a system of things and persons connected together, taken to be the same for oneself at different times and for different minds at the same time, yet existing, for oneself, in the medium of one’s individual consciousness. We see at once that we cannot stop here. We have really got a contradiction. If the parts of our world are connected with each other, they are not merely dependent upon us, that is, upon the changes of our consciousness. And we all take them to be independent of us, in the sense that we do not suppose the presence or absence of our perception to make any difference to the world except by the continuance or cessation of our perception of it or of its parts. This is the state of mind in which we practically live, philosophers and all. I do not really take notice of any difference in mode of existence between the wall in front of me, which I see, and the wall behind me, which I {8} do not see. While you are in this lecture-hall, if you think of your rooms at home, you think of them as they look, that is, as they would look if you were there to see them. How else, indeed, could you think of them? This is practically necessary, and therefore, for practical purposes, true. But if you take it as a theory, omitting the hypothetical factor, “if I was there to see,” you go wrong. You then treat your world as being, outside your consciousness, the same that it is inside your consciousness, without allowing for the withdrawal of your consciousness. You are then on the way to think that the world, as you see, hear, and feel it, is outside your mind, and that the sight, hearing, feeling, and the ideas born of them, are inside your mind as a sort of faint and imperfect copy of the world which you then call “external,” in the sense of outside the mind. Common sense i. The first position was that of common sense. The second is that of common-sense theory. Common sense is quite justified. It says, “Things affect each other, but the mere presence and absence of our perception does not affect them.” For practical purposes we must treat them as being, when unapprehended by our minds, just the same as when apprehended by our minds. This is the first idea or rather postulate—for it is not a theoretical idea—of objectivity. Objective = “independent of our consciousness for practical purposes.” Common-sense theory ii. In describing the second position as that of common-sense theory I do not refer to the doctrine of any regular school of philosophers. There was a Scotch school of philosophy—the school of Reid in the eighteenth century—commonly called the common-sense school. I will say {9} below how I think this school was related to the position which I am now describing. But my present purpose is to hit off the simple theory of reality which common-sense people make for themselves when they reflect. Now this theory, in which we all live except when we make a special effort, accepts the distinction between things and the mind. For example, it defines truth as the conformity of ideas to objects. That means something of this kind: the ideas are inside our heads, and the objects are outside our heads. If we are to have knowledge, the objects have to be represented inside our heads, and they get in through the senses. And then you have two similar forms of the world, one outside our heads, which is real, and another like it but less perfect and without solidity or causal power, inside our heads, which is ideal or mental. This is what I call the common-sense theory of the Objective. Like common sense, it assumes that there is a world which the withdrawal of our individual consciousness does not affect, but which persists and acts all the same. Unlike common sense, it lays down an assertion as to the nature of this world, viz. that it is, apart from our consciousness, the same as it is for our consciousness. The world in consciousness, it assumes, is subjective, the world out of consciousness is objective, and the former is an imperfect copy of the latter in a feebler material. The schools of common-sense philosophy, such as are represented by Locke and Reid, are not quite so simple-minded as the reflection of ordinary common sense, because every systematic thinker sees at once that the question stares him in the face, “If the world outside the mind is copied {10} by the world inside the mind, how can we ever know whether the copy conforms to the original?” We are by the hypothesis inside the mind; whatever has passed through the senses is inside the mind. We cannot as at present advised get at anything outside the senses or outside the mind. In face of this question, the common-sense philosophies have two courses open. They may start from the idea of things outside the mind, but admit that in passing through the senses the things are in some partial respects transformed—as for instance, that they acquire colour, sound, and smell in passing through the senses—this is what Locke says. Or again, still starting from the idea of things outside the mind, they may simply assert that perception is of such a nature that it gives us things as they really are. The former was the view of Locke, the latter that of Reid. This latter view obviously might pass into the most extreme idealism, and its interpretation, if it does not so pass, is exceedingly difficult. But whatever may have been the view of the historical “common-sense school,” [1] the common-sense theory which we all make for ourselves involves a separation between the mind and reality. The objective world is the world as independent of mind, and independent of mind means existing and acting outside mind, exactly, or almost exactly, as it seems to exist and act before the mind. [1] See Seth, Scottish Philosophy (Blackwood, 1885). Now this is an absolute cul-de-sac. If the objective is that which is outside perception, the objective is out of our reach, and the world of our perception can never be objective. This is the pass to which we are brought by taking {11} common sense as the guide of theory and not as its material. Philosophical theory. iii. There is no way out but by retracing our steps, and avoiding a false turn which we took in passing from common sense to common-sense theory. It was quite true that the world is unaffected by the withdrawal of my individual perception and consciousness (except in so far as I acted qua bodily thing in the world); but it does not follow from this that if it becomes the object of a consciousness in me, it can be so otherwise than as presented within that consciousness. We must distinguish between the idea that the objective is outside consciousness and therefore not in consciousness, and the idea that the objective can be in the individual consciousness, but identified with something beyond the individual consciousness. It may be that consciousness is capable of containing a world, not as a copy of a ready-made original, but as something which it makes for itself by a necessary process, and which refers beyond this finite and momentary consciousness. According to these ideas, the objective is, shortly stated, whatever we are obliged to think. This, though it is in our thought, is not considered merely as our thought, or as a train of images or whole of presentation in our minds. That is an artificial point of view, the point of view of psychology, and we must carefully avoid starting from it. But knowledge refers beyond its mental self, and has no limitation in time or in kind except its own necessity. Thus, I am forced to think, by a certain context of ideas and perceptions, that there is now a fire burning in my study at home. This judgment is not barred by the fact that my mind, as a {12} function attached to my body, is here three miles away. The thought is objective for me, so long as I am obliged to think it. My presence in or absence from the room where the fire is burning has no effect on the question, except as it furnishes me with evidence one way or the other. Not only absence in space is no obstacle, but succession in time is no obstacle. My thought, which is here and now, refers confidently to what has happened in long intervals of time, if the necessity of consistency obliges it to do so. Thus if I go back to my room and find the fire out and the room very cold, I infer without hesitation to certain acts and events which are needed to explain this state of things. And interpretations or explanations of this kind make up my world, which is for me in my thought, but is presented as more than my thought, and cannot be a world at all unless it is more than in my thought. It is in as far as my thought constructs and presents a world which is more than my momentary psychical state, that my thought, and the world as presented to me in it, is objective. The world is not a set of my ideas, but it is a set of objects and relations of which I frame an idea, and the existence of which has no meaning for me except as presented in the idea which 1 frame. We are not to think of (i) Ideas, and (ii) Things which they represent; the ideas, taken as parts of a world, are the things. We begin to see, then, how the nature of knowledge meets the puzzle which I stated above. How, I asked, can a connected “world,” whose parts act on one another quite independently of my perception, be in my individual mind? I answer that it does not follow, because the world is for me {13} only in my presentation, that my presentation is the only thing which goes on in the world. “What I am obliged to think” may represent a real development depending on laws and a system which is not confined to my individual course of consciousness. The “objective” in this sense is for Logic an assumption, or rather a fact to be analysed. We do not attempt to prove its existence, except in the sense of calling attention to its nature in detail. It will be seen that “outside the mind” ceases, on this view of objectivity, to have meaning as regards anything that can be related to us. “Outside” is a relation of bodies to one another; but everything, about which we can so much as ask a question, is so far inside the mind, i.e. given in its continuum of presentation or idea. I will recapitulate the three conceptions of the “objective.” (1) According to practical “common sense” the objective is independent of our consciousness in the sense that the presence or absence of our consciousness makes no difference to the operation of things upon each other. (2) According to “common-sense theory” the objective is independent of our consciousness in the sense that the presence or absence of our consciousness makes no difference in the mode of being of things (viz. that the world in consciousness approaches objectivity by resembling or reproducing a similar and quite objective world outside consciousness). (3) According to philosophical theory the objective is independent of our consciousness in the sense that it is what we are constrained to think in order to make our consciousness consistent with itself. “What we are constrained to {14} think” is not confined, in its reference to our thought, or to thought at all. Our separate worlds. 7. Thus, for the purposes of Logic, we must turn our usual ideas upside down. We must try to imagine something of this kind. We have all seen a circular panorama. Each one of us, we must think, is shut up alone inside such a panorama, which is movable and flexible, and follows him wherever he goes. The things and persons depicted in it move and act upon one another; but all this is in the panorama, and not beyond it. The individual cannot get outside this encircling scenery, and no one else can get inside it. Apart from it, prior to it, we have no self; it is indeed the stuff of which oneself is made. Is every one’s panorama exactly the same? No, they are not exactly the same. They are formed round different centres, each person differing from all the others by individual qualities, and by his position towards the points and processes which determine his picture. For—and here is the remarkable point—every one of us has painted for himself the picture within which he is shut up, and he is perpetually painting and re-painting it, not by copying from some original, but by arranging and completing confused images and tints that are always appearing magically on his canvas. Now this magical panorama, from which the individual cannot escape, and the laws of which are the laws of his experience, is simply his own mind regarded as a content or a world. His own body and mind, regarded as things, are within the panorama, just as other people’s bodies and minds are. The whole world, for each of us, is our course of consciousness, in so far as this is regarded as a system of objects which we are obliged to {15} think. Not, in so far as it really is a system, for an onlooker, say for a psychologist. For no doubt every child’s mind, and every animal’s mind, is a working system of presentations, which a psychologist may study and analyse from without. Consciousness is consciousness of a world only in so far as it presents a system, a whole of objects, acting on one another, and therefore independent of the presence or absence of the consciousness which presents them. I take another very rough metaphor to explain this curious contrast between my mind as a working system, observable from without, and belonging to my individual body—distinguishable from the thirty or forty quite different minds belonging to the thirty or forty persons in this room—and my mind as a continuum of presentations which includes, as objects, itself, and all the other minds in the room, and the whole world so far as I have any conscious relation to it whatever. All of us are familiar with the appearance of a microscope ready adjusted for use, with its little lamp, its mirror and illuminating apparatus under the stage, with a specimen on the stage under the object-glass, its object-glass and its eye-piece. Any one who understands the working of a microscope finds this a most suggestive spectacle. He follows in his imagination the light as it comes from the lamp to the mirror, through the illuminating lenses, through the transparent specimen, through perhaps a dozen lenses arranged as an object-glass within an inch of distance, through the eye-piece and into the observer’s eye. Give him the parts, lenses, prisms, and mirrors into his hands, and he will test them all, and tell you exactly how they work. This {16} scientific onlooker may be compared to the psychologist looking at another man’s mind. He sees it as a thing among other things, a working system of parts. But there is one thing that the mere onlooker cannot see. He cannot see the object. That can only be seen by looking through the tube. And every one has felt, I should think, the magical transformation, suggestive of looking through another man’s eye and mind, which occurs when you put your eye to the eye-piece of an optical instrument. The outside world of other objects, the tube, the stage, the mirror, the bystanders, the external light, all disappear, and you see nothing but the field of vision and whatever distinctly pictured structure may be displayed within it. The observer who looks through the tube may be compared with each one of us as he contemplates his own world of knowledge and perception. This is a thing that no one else can ever do. The metaphor, indeed, breaks down, in so far as each of us is able to observe the history and character of his own mind as an object within the field of presentation which is before his mind. Of course such a metaphor must break down at some point. But it remains true that the mind, while directly observing its field of objects, cannot observe its own peculiarities, and when turned, as we say, upon itself, is still observing only a part of itself. It remains true that my mind contains the whole presented world for me and is merely one among thousands of similar mind-things for you. Thus, I repeat, the world for each of us is our course of consciousness, looked at in that way in which it presents a {17} systematic, organised picture of inter-acting objects, not in that way in which it is a stream of ideas and feelings, taking place in our several heads. In the former point of view it is the world as our idea; in the latter point of view it is simply the consciousness attached to our body. We might soon puzzle ourselves with the contradictions which arise if we fail to distinguish these points of view. In one sense my mind is in my head, in the other sense my head is in my mind. In the one sense I am in space, in the other sense space is in me. Just so, however rough the metaphor, from one point of view the microscope is one among a host of things seen from the outside; from the other point of view all that we see is in the microscope, which is itself not seen at all. It is in this latter sense that our mental equipment is looked at, when it is regarded as knowledge; and it is in this sense that it forms a panorama which absolutely shuts in every one of us into his own circle of ideas. (It is not implied, we should carefully observe, that his ideas or experience are in any way secondary to his self, or separable from it, or an adjective of it.) Then how does it happen that our separate worlds, the panoramas which we construct, do not contradict one another? The answer is, that they correspond. It is this conception from which we must start in Logic. We must learn to regard our separate worlds of knowledge; as something constructed by definite processes, and corresponding to each other in consequence of the common nature of these processes. We know that we begin apart. We begin in fact, though not conscious of our limits, with feelings and fancies and unorganised experiences which give us little or no {18} common ground and power of co-operation with other people. But as the constructive process advances, the correspondence between our worlds is widened and deepened, and the greater proportion of what we are obliged to think is in harmony with what other people are obliged to think. Now of course this would not be so unless reality, the whole actual system in which we find ourselves, were self-consistent. But more than that, it would not be so unless the nature of intelligence were the same in every mind. It is this common nature of intelligence, together with its differentiated adaptations to reality, that we have to deal with in Logic. Thus the separate worlds, in which we are all shut up, must be considered as corresponding so far as they are objective, that is, so far as they approach what we are ultimately obliged to think. I say “corresponding,” because that is the term which expresses the relation between systems which represent the same thing by the same rules, but with different starting-points. Drawings in perspective of the same building from different points of view are such corresponding systems; the parts represented answer each to each, but the same part is near or large in one drawing, and distant and small in another; not, however, by chance, but as a definite consequence of the same laws. Our separate worlds may be compared to such drawings: the things in them are identified by their relations and functions, so that we can understand each other, i.e. make identical references, though my drawing be taken from the east, and yours from the west. The things do not look quite the same in our different worlds; besides being taken from different standpoints, both drawings are imperfect and incorrect. But so {19} long as we can make out the correspondence, we have a basis for co-operation and for discussion. Logic shows us the principles and processes by which, under the given influences, these drawings are constructed. Subjective Idealism 8. If we merely hold to the doctrine of separate worlds, without insisting upon their correspondence with each other and with reality, we fall back into the position of subjective idealism, which is a natural completion of common-sense theory, when, instead of turning round to retrace its path, it runs deeper into the cul-de-sac. It is a very obvious reflection, that each of us is shut up within his own mind, and much easier to grasp than the reason for assuming a real system which appears differently, though correspondingly, in the centres of consciousness which are ourselves. We cannot get at anything but in terms of consciousness; how can we justify the assumption that our consciousness of a world of objects is rooted in reality, e.g., that objects may rightly be treated as persisting and inter-acting when our personal consciousness is withdrawn? And if we once doubt this, then why should we assume that our ideas need be or tend to be consistent with themselves and each other, as for the time they apparently are? Subjective Idealism necessarily arises if the common-sense theory of two worlds, the real outside the mind, and the ideal, copying it, within the mind, is pushed to its conclusion. The real, outside the mind, being inaccessible, falls away. The arguments of this Idealism, as Hume said, “admit of no answer and produce no conviction.” [1] But I {20} mention the idea, because I do not think that any one can really understand the problem of Logic, or indeed of science in general, without having thoroughly thought himself into the difficulty of Subjective Idealism. It is necessary to be wholly dissatisfied with common-sense theory, and with the notion of a ready-made world set up for us to copy in the mind, before the logical analysis of intellectual construction can have interest or meaning for us. And to produce this dissatisfaction is the value of Subjective Idealism. [1] Vol. iv. p. 176 (ed. of 1854), Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, sect. 12. {21} LECTURE II “JUDGMENT” AS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF A WORLDDefect of Subjective Idealism 1. The last lecture was devoted to explaining the distinction between the stream of presentations and the world as it is for knowledge. I ended by calling attention to the theory known as “Subjective Idealism.” This, I said, has the merit of forcing upon us the question, “How do we get from mind to reality? How do we get from subjective to objective?” For we have always to remember that our knowledge is within consciousness, though it may refer outside it. On the other hand, Subjective Idealism has the defect of confounding the very distinction which we took so much trouble to make plain. Its essence lies in ascribing to the world of knowledge properties which are only true of the stream of presentation. It is quite true that the actual presentations of this room, which each of us has in his head at this moment, are all different from each other, and different from any which we have had before, and shall ever have again. Every minute, every second, they differ; they are perishing existences, wholly mental, and each of them when past is irrecoverably gone. That is the property of a presentation within the course of consciousness. It is a particular perishing existence. {22} But Subjective Idealism says, “Because these mental existences are particular perishing existences, and all knowledge consists in them as its medium, therefore the object of knowledge is nothing beyond these mental facts, and is not rooted in a permanent system [1] independent of our mental connections.” Here we must check the inference, and reply, “No, it does not follow. The presentations which themselves come and go may refer to something in common, and through them all we may become aware of something that is not wholly in any of them.” In other words, there is in Knowledge no passage from subjective to objective, but only a development of the objective. [1] Our estimate of Berkeley’s view must depend on the degree in which we judge him to have identified the Deity with, or separated Him from, a permanent and universal system. The statement in the text applies fairly to Hume. The world as Knowledge 2. Therefore we say, coming closer to our subject, that “Knowledge is the medium in which our world, as an interrelated whole, [1] exists for us.” This is more than saying that it exists in mind or presentation, because the mere course of consciousness need not amount to Knowledge. A world, that is, a system of things acting on one another, could not exist merely in the course of our ideas. But Knowledge, we said, is the mental construction of reality. It consists of what we are obliged to assert in thought, and because we are all obliged to think assertorily according to the same methods, the results of our thinking form corresponding systems—systems that correspond alike to each other and to reality. (I may be asked, does not this agreement of {23} our knowledge depend on the agreement of the physical stimuli supplied to us by nature, as well as on the homogeneousness of our intelligences? The answer is, that these stimuli, or nature, have no priority in Knowledge. Their identity is merely a case or consequence of the identity of our experience as a whole. We are regarding nature as a system developed in experience, not as an unknown somewhat behind it. To suppose that solid or extended existence somehow comes before and accounts for everything else, is a form of the common-sense theory we have dismissed. Knowledge and Truth have their limitations as forms of Reality, but an appeal to solidity or extension will not furnish the required supplementation.) [1] The words italicised make a reservation in favour of feeling, which has its own form of reality, but is not relational. Knowledge is in the form of Judgement 3. All that we have been saying about Knowledge is summed up in the sentence, “Knowledge is a judgment, an affirmation.” We need not trouble ourselves yet about negation. We all know what affirmative assertion is, and it is near enough for the present to say that all knowledge is judgment in the sense of affirmative assertion. I will explain how we sum up all we have said of knowledge by calling it a judgment. Judgment or affirmation always implies three properties, though they are not always recognised. It is (a) necessary, (b) universal, and (c) constructive. Judgment necessary (a) Judgment is necessary. In saying this, we express all that we said about the objectivity of the world in knowledge. “Objective” meant, we concluded, what we are obliged to think. And judgment is necessary, because it expresses what we are obliged to think; obliged, that is, not as we are obliged to feel pain, as an unexplained and {24} isolated fact, but obliged by a necessity operative within the movement of our consciousness, though not, of course, theoretically recognised as necessity in common thinking. Thus, in the simplest phases of Judgment, necessity does begin to approach the kind of necessity by which we feel pain or are visited by persistent irrational associations. We can trace an explicit sense of necessity in any scientific matter, or in any doubtful and complex matters in which we are aware of our own reflections. We constantly hear and read such phrases as, “I am unable to resist the conclusion”; “I am forced to believe”; “I am driven to think”; “I have no alternative but to suppose.” These are every-day phrases in controversy and in theoretical discussion. And what they all mean is just what was insisted on in the last lecture; the objective or real for us is what we are obliged to think. Given our perceptive state and our mental equipment, the judgment follows. In trivial or simple judgments this necessity is harder to observe within consciousness, and approaches more and more to the mere constraint exercised upon us by physical reality. In a judgment of mere sensuous comparison, such as a “colour-match,” the necessity is not that of an intellectual system, but almost that of a feeling which we cannot dispel. The chief intellectual labour is here negative, and consists in precautions to remove all disturbing influences, both mental and material, so as to let the perception operate freely on the mind. But yet here is necessity; we never for a moment think that we can modify the result; our aim is simply to distinguish from all others the particular strand of necessity by which we desire to be guided. {25} It is easy for an observer to detect intellectual necessity in judgment, even where the judging subject is wholly unreflective. If you contradict an obvious judgment made by an uneducated man, he will no doubt be quite unable to point out the intellectual necessity which constrains him to it, i.e. to argue in support of it; but he will be bewildered and probably indignant, which shows that, unknown to himself, his whole intellectual existence is really impeached by impeachment of a necessary conclusion from it. Many people cannot see the difference between impeaching their argument and impeaching their veracity; and this confusion arises, I presume, from a just feeling that their whole mind is on its trial in the one case as in the other, although they do not distinguish between the forms of its action which are concerned. We are told, indeed, in formal logic, that ordinary statements of fact do not claim necessity; but this merely arises from confining necessity to explicit necessity expressed in a special grammatical form. But, it may be objected, we do not always feel that every trivial judgment emanates from and so implicates our whole mental constitution and equipment. If I say to a friend, “I saw you at Charing Cross yesterday,” and he says, “No, you could not, for I was out of town,” then, unless I was very certain indeed, I should admit having made a mistake, and think no more about the matter. That only means, (1) that the unity of the mind is not thoroughly complete—there are many more or less detached systems in the mind, and one of them may not be very deeply inwrought in the whole intellectual frame; and (2) the necessity of thought may itself modify the certainty of the fact, e.g. I know that {26} a mistake of identity is quite a common thing, and this knowledge co-operates with my friend’s denial. But in any perceptive judgment, however unimportant its immediate content, if it is clear and persistent, a contradiction is a most serious thing. There is a well-known form of bewilderment connected with the judgment of direction; if you forget or do not know of a turn that you have taken, and come out, for example, on familiar ground from the North when you think you are coming on it from the South, so that objects have the reverse position of what you expected, then, supposing that you cannot explain the contradiction, the result is sometimes a very grave perplexity; some men are quite unhinged by it for the moment, and a psychologist in France [1] has given it a new name, “Vertigo of Direction.” This again shows how your whole intellectual nature is staked upon the most trifling perception, and if you seem to be forced to a flat contradiction even in the simplest judgment you are almost “beside yourself.” [1] M. Binet. See Mind, x. 156. Judgment universal (b) Judgment is universal. There are different senses of “universal” as of “necessary.” We are now speaking only in the widest sense, in which universality is a property of all judgment whatever. If we assume that all our intellectual natures are the same, then to be universal is a mere consequence of being necessary. I not only feel that my judgment is inevitable for me, but I never think of doubting that, given the same materials, it is obligatory for every other intelligent being. If some one disagrees with a judgment of mine, I try to put the case before him as it is in my mind. And I am absolutely sure that if I could do so, he {27} would be obliged to judge as I do. If it were not so, we should never think of arguing. We should simply say, “Perhaps his mind is differently constituted from mine,” as, in fact, with reference to special sets of dominant ideas, and to special provinces of experience, we often do say. But these we regard as hindrances, imperfections, accidents. We do not doubt that the system of reason is active in him as in us. And thus, as reason is essentially a system, the universality of judgment involves something more. We not only think that our judgment is obligatory upon every one else, in as far as they have the same materials, but we think that it must be consistent with the judgments of all other persons, just as much as with our own. If it is inconsistent with any other judgment, we think that one of the two must be wrong; that is, we will not admit the possibility that the real world, as others construct it, is out of harmony with the real world as we construct it. Thus knowledge, being judgment, is necessary and universal, and in the widest sense this is true of all judgments. Judgment is constructive (c) These are two properties of the Judgment, but they do not tell us what it is. We shall of course examine its nature more fully in the later lectures. At present we need only think of it as affirmation. This may be simply described as “pronouncing the interpretation of our perceptions to form one system with the data of our perceptions.” We may at once admit the distinction between data and interpretation to be only relative. Its relativity is the consequence of the constructed or so to speak artificial {28} character of our real world. We can get at no data unqualified by judgment. We may take as an example our perception of things in space. How much of what we see is given in present sense-perception? This is a question to which there is no definite answer. We do not know what the presentations of vision were like before we had learnt to see as a fully conscious human being sees. We have no right to assume, that after we have learned to see in this way the actual sense-presentation remains the same as it was in a different stage of our visual education. We can give no precise meaning in the way of a time-limit to the presentness of perception. But we know this much, that it takes a long time and many kinds of experience to learn to see as an educated human being sees, and that this acquired capacity is never at a stand-still, but is always being extended or diminished according to the vitality, growth, or atrophy of our apperceptive masses. There is always a certain element of amplification or interpretation, which by experience, or attentive introspection we can eliminate from the data, apparently forced upon us by reality, although these data themselves are modified through and through both by habitual interpretation, and by the very defining attention which aims at eliminating all amplification from them. But yet the whole of sense-perception has a peculiar quality in being present. Artificial though it is, it yet, relatively speaking, contains an irreducible datum. It is distinguishable from everything which is not present. It is pervaded by something which we cannot reduce to {29} intellectual relation, though if we withdrew from it all that is relation, the apparent datum would be gone. Now Knowledge is the affirmation or judgment which identifies the constructive interpretation of our present perception with the reality which present perception forces upon us. This is clear enough to begin with, but will have to be modified below to suit the more circuitous or mediate types of Judgment. I take two examples, one from sight and one from sound. Here is a table. In common language we should all say, “We see that is a table.” The expression is quite correct, because human seeing is a judgment. But yet, if you were asked to reduce your perception to terms of sight pure and simple—I mean of visual sensation—why, unless you were an analytic psychologist or a very skilful artist, you would not be able to do it. To speak of one point only, you would have to eliminate the attribute of depth and distance. That is all, so far as mere vision is concerned, your theory and your interpretation. The problem for an artist is to get back, at his high plane of perceptive power, to what in theory would be the lower plane. He has to re-translate his perception of a thing in space into a flat coloured surface. The difference between his flat picture and a real object in space is a rough measure of the difference made by interpretation or implication in the datum of sense-perception when we say, judging by sight only, “That is a table.” All the experiences of touch and motion, from which we have learned to perceive the solidity of the object, are, theoretically speaking, put into the judgment by us. They are not given by the eye alone, although we cannot now {30} separate them from that which is given by the eye alone. For the artist’s flat picture, which I used as an illustration, is not a stage in our visual education. Our visual education has proceeded pari passu with our education by touch and motion; and we saw objects in space as solids, long before we reflected that for the eye alone a coloured surface would naturally appear as flat. [1] [1] The view that depth is a visual datum in the same sense as breadth seems to me in flagrant contradiction with experience. But for our present purpose the question is only one of degree, as no one maintains, that either depth or breadth are seen without education as an adult sees them. But this impossibility of getting at an original datum only shows how entirely we are right in saying that our world is constructed by judgment. For the process of interpretative amplification passes quite continuously from the unconscious to the conscious; and every definitely expressed judgment, though perfectly homogeneous with the processes which have qualified its datum, and though it may fall wholly within the maximum of what in ordinary parlance we should call a simple given perception, contains an identification of some ideal element, enlargement, or interpretation, with that relatively given element which reveals itself through a peculiar quality of presentness pervading the “given” perception. In the example “That is a table,” the unity of judgment is so well shown that the identification becomes almost unreal. In fact, we never judge except to satisfy an interest and so simple a judgment used as an example, apart from any context which could explain the need for it, has an air of unreality. You may hear a child make such a judgment {31} constantly in the sheer pleasure of recognition. An adult would never make it explicitly unless in some particular context; but it is made, as I shall maintain below, by the mere glance of his eye which takes in the table as a real object in a real world of space. Its appearance to the eye is in this case the datum, while the interpretation consists in construing this appearance as a solid individual existence in space. We will look at an example in which the discrimination of elements is easier. Take the affirmation, “That is a cab,” assuming it to be made from merely hearing a sound. In this we can much more nearly separate the datum or minimum of sense from our enlargement or interpretation of it, and we know that our interpretation is liable to be wrong; that is to say, the reality into which we ought to construe the sound may be some other kind of vehicle, and not a cab. Now compare this with the affirmation, “That (which I see) is a cab.” This judgment of sight-perception, though its terms are more inextricably interwoven, has just the same elements in it as the judgment of sound-perception, “That (which I hear) is a cab.” In the sound-perception the structure is quite plain. A particular complex quality in the sound suggests as its objective explanation, what is perfectly distinguishable from it in thought, the movement of a cab on a particular kind of pavement. The quality of the sound, its roughness, loudness, increase and decrease, all form points of connection with the sound of a cab as we know it, and with the speed, weight, etc. of such a vehicle. But it is quite easy to consider the sound in itself apart from its interpretation, and we sometimes feel the {32} interpretation to be more immediate, and sometimes more inferential. We sometimes say, “I hear a cab,” just as we say, “I see one,” but in case of sound we more often perhaps say, “That sounds like—” such and such a thing, which indicates a doubt, and the beginning of conscious inference. Thus we see how continuous is the mental construction of reality. From our unreflective education in seeing, hearing, and touching, to the explicit judgment of the trained observer, which in its turn passes readily into inference, there is no definite break. Once the idea of reality, or of a world, is applied in practice (I do not say reflectively grasped), there is no further difficulty in principle throughout the whole process of its construction. We may then sum up so far: our knowledge, or our world in knowledge, exists for us as a judgment, that is, as an affirmation in which our present perception is amplified by an ideal interpretation which is identified with it. This interpretation or enlargement claims necessity or universality, and is therefore objective as our world, i.e. is what we are obliged to think, and what we are all obliged to think. The whole system in process of construction, viz. our present perception as extended by interpretation, is what we mean by reality, only with a reservation in favour of forms of experience which are not intellectual at all. Every judgment then affirms something to be real, and therefore affirms reality to be defined, in part, by that something. Knowledge exists in the form of affirmations about reality. And our world as existing for us in the medium of knowledge consists, for us, of a standing affirmation about reality. {33} Continuous affirmation of waking consciousness 4. This standing affirmation about reality may be described in other words as “the continuous affirmative judgment of the waking consciousness.” In the common logic-books you will find judgment treated only as the “proposition,” that is, as an assertion made in language. That is a very convenient way of treating the judgment, and is not false, if you remember that the proposition, that is, the assertory sentence, is rather a translation of the judgment than the judgment itself. But the judgment expressed in a proposition is always some one definite assertion, with a limited subject and predicate. We shall speak of the judgment in this sense—the usual sense—later. But to-day I want to describe the judgment in a more extended sense, that is, as co-extensive with the waking human consciousness, so far as aware of a world. If Judgment consists in the extension of our perceptions by an interpretation considered as equally real with their content, it clearly is not confined to the particular facts and truths which from time to time we utter in language. And more than this, everything that we do definitely utter, implies a great deal which is not definitely uttered. If I say, “I have to catch the train at Sloane Square to go down to Essex Hall,” I only mention the reality of one train, one square, and one building. But my assertion shades off into innumerable facts, the equal reality of which as elements in my world is necessary to make this judgment intelligible and true. It implies the real existence of the underground railway, which implies that of London, and therefore that of the surface of our globe in a certain definite order, and of the civilised world. It implies the reality of this building and of the meetings which we hold in it, of the University {34} Extension system, and of my own life and habits as enabling me to take part in the work of that system. Only a part of this is in the focus of my attention as I judge; but the whole is a continuous context, the parts of which are inseparable; and although I do not affirm the whole of it in so many words, when I say that I am coming down here by train this evening, yet if any part of it was not affirmed the rest would, so to speak, fall to pieces, i.e. would lose relations in the absence of which its meaning would be destroyed. Other detached parts of one’s life and knowledge may seem to be separable from the content of such a judgment; but on looking closely we see that this is not the case. So long as we are awake, our whole world is conceived as real, and forms for us a single immense affirmation, which hangs from present perception, and shares its constraining power. My present perception is the illuminated spot, and shades off gradually into the rest which forms the background, receiving from this background its organised systematic individuality, while impressing upon it a relation to its own sensuous presentness. We have only to reflect, in order to illustrate this connection, on the way in which the idea of London forms a determining background for the present perception of this room, while on the other hand it is perceived by us as real in our presentation of this room. And indeed the simplest example of what I am pointing out is the arrangement of objects and places in space. The visual picture which each of us forms of this room is certainly an affirmative judgment. It is a judgment because it consists of ideas affirmed as true of reality. As we look round, all the distances of the objects and the walls from {35} each other, and their shapes and position, seem to be imprinted on our minds without an effort. But really they are conclusions from long education in the art of seeing and from the experience of the other senses. They are an enlargement or interpretation of sense-perception, taken as real, i.e. as forming a system which is one with the content of sense-perception, and touches us through sense-perception, and therefore they exist for us in the form of Judgment. And, as I described before, our whole world, both of things in space and of our own history and circumstances, is also affirmed as the background implied in this picture. That is to say, it is all connected together, it is all taken as equally real, and it is all vouched for by its connection with what is given to us in perception. What do we mean by saying that the Antipodes are real, and implied in my perception of this room? We mean that they are an element, necessary to educated thought, in the same system with which I am in contact at this moment by sight, touch, and hearing, the system of reality. And though I may not have explicitly thoughts of them since entering the room till now, yet, if they were no part of my affirmed system of ideas, my perception of anything in space would be quite different from what it is. This sense of necessary connection is confined, I think, to our waking consciousness. Of course there are degrees between waking and dreaming; but I should be inclined to set up the presence or absence of judgment as a very fair test of those degrees. We say that a man is awake in as far as he is aware (i) of a reality which is not his mere course of consciousness, and (ii.) of the same reality of which other {36} people are aware; i.e. in as far as he identifies his present perception with a reality, and that the real reality. It is said that surprise, i.e. the sense of conflict between expectation and the reality, is absent In dreams, and in a very remarkable passage Aeschylus identifies the life of the savage in his (imaginary) primitive state with a dream-life, considered as a life of sensuous presentation, in which the interpretative judgment of perception was absent. With extraordinary profoundness, in portraying this all but animal existence, he strikes out all those relations to the objective world by which man forms for himself a system that goes beyond the present, so as to leave the stream of presentation without any background of organised reality. [1] [1] I quote from Mrs. Browning’s Translation of the Prometheus Bound, which seems close enough for the present purpose. “And let me tell you, not as taunting men, |
|