In the seventh section of the introduction Bosanquet explains his meaning further by what the reader is privileged to regard as a flight of the imagination—a mere simile—which he thinks may, nevertheless, make the matter clearer.

According to this view, the idea obtains the universality which constitutes it an idea by a sort of process of elimination. It is like a composite photograph. It selects only the common elements in a large number of particular existences, and thus succeeds in representing, or referring to, all the particular existences which have gone to make it up. But when we come to consider the bearing which this view of universality, or generalized significance, has on our estimate of the knowledge-process, we feel that it has not solved the problem for us. In the first place, the idea in its existence is just as particular when regarded as made up of the common elements of many ideas as is any of the ideas whose elements are taken. A composite photograph is just as much a single photograph as any one of the photographs which are taken to compose it. The chasm between the particularity of the psychical image and the universality of its meaning is not bridged by regarding the content of the image as made up by eliminating unlike elements in a number of images. The stuff with which thought has to work is still nothing more than a particular psychical image, and the problem of what gives it its logical value as a general significance is still unsolved. Nor does it seem possible to find anything in the existence of the image which could account for its reference to something outside of itself. The fact of reference itself becomes an ultimate mystery.[48]

But even waiving this difficulty, the judgment must still appear truncated, if it really totally disregard a part of its content—i. e., the particular existence of the image as part of the judging consciousness. The theory holds that the particular existence of the image has no logical value. It is only its meaning, or general reference, which has logical value. But the image qua image is just as real as that to which it is supposed to refer. If the judgment really does ignore its existence, then it ignores a portion of the reality it attempts to represent, and stands self-confessed as a failure.[49] At still another point, ideas, as Bosanquet represents them, prove to be unsatisfactory tools to use in the work of building up reality. In Bosanquet's words: "The meaning tyrannizes over the psychical image in another respect. Besides crushing out of sight its particular and exclusive existence, it also crushes out part of its content" (p. 74). The idea, as we use it, is not, as to content, a complete or accurate representation of anything real. To take Bosanquet's illustration:

And by the time all this is performed what sort of a representation of reality is the idea? Evidently a very poor and meager and fragmentary one.

It is so poor and fragmentary, that it cannot itself be that which is affirmed of reality. It must be some other fuller existence to be found in the world of meanings which is affirmed. And yet how the meager content of the idea succeeds in referring to the world of meanings, and acting as the instrument for referring a meaning to reality, is not at all clear. It seems impossible to explain reference intelligibly by the concept of a correspondence of contents.

The fundamental difficulty in the interpretation of the predicate is the same one that we encountered in the interpretation of the subject. If the predicate is to be affirmed of reality (and if it be not, it has no logical value), then it must, when affirmed, be in some sense an accurate representation of reality. But the predicate is an idea, and, moreover, an idea which is, both in its existence and in its meaning palpably the outcome of transformations wrought upon given sensory contents by the individual consciousness. Since the one point of contact with reality is in sensory experience, the more simple sensory experiences are reacted upon and worked over, the farther they recede from reality. The idea seems, therefore, in its very essence, a thing which never can be affirmed of reality. As image it is itself a reality, but not affirmed; as meaning it is that reality (the image) manipulated for individual ends. Why suppose that by distorting reality we get it in shape to affirm of reality? Moreover, the farther an idea is removed from immediate sensory experience—in other words, the more abstract it becomes—the less is the possibility of affirming it of reality. The final outcome of this point of view, if we adhere rigorously to its logic is that the more thinking we do, the less we know about the real world. Bosanquet avoids this conclusion by a pure act of faith. If knowledge is to be rescued, we must believe that the work done by consciousness upon the bits of reality given in sensory experience really does succeed in building up a knowledge of reality for us. As Bosanquet puts it: "The presentation of Reality, qualified by an ideal content, is one aspect of Subject and Predication; and my individual percipient consciousness determining itself by a symbolic idea is the other. That the latter is identified with the former follows from the claim of conscious thought that its nature is to know."[50] (P. 83.)

To sum up the situation, Bosanquet starts out with the assumption that by knowledge we must mean knowledge of a world entirely independent of our ideas. If we fail to make this assumption, knowledge becomes merely a relation between ideas. But its whole importance seems to us to rest on the conviction that it does give us knowledge of a world which is what it is quite independently of our ideas about it, and cannot in any sense be modified by what we think about it. What knowledge does is to give us a copy or representation of the real world, whose value depends on the accuracy of the representation. And yet when we examine any individual knowing consciousness, the subject which appears within the judgment is never some portion of the world which exists outside of the knowing consciousness, but always some portion of the world which exists within the knowing consciousness, and which is constituted by the knowledge process. The predicate which is affirmed of reality is constantly found to derive its meaning, its generalized significance, not from its correspondence with, or reference to, the real world outside of the knowing consciousness, but from reference to a world of meanings, which consists in a sort of convention among rational beings—a world whose existence is distinctly within the knowing consciousness and not outside of it.[51] Between the real world, as Bosanquet conceives it, and the world of knowledge, we find inserted on the side of the subject, the world as known to each of us, and on the side of the predicate, the objective world of meanings. Neither of these is the real world. Both of them are ideal, i. e., are constructions of the individual consciousness. We nowhere find any satisfactory explanation of how these ideal worlds are related to the real world. There is merely the assertion that we must believe that they represent the real world in order that we may believe that knowledge exists. But the fact remains that whenever we try to analyze and explain any particular judgment, what we find ourselves dealing with is always the world as it exists to us as subject, and the objective world of meanings as predicate. If we stop here, then knowledge turns out to be just what Bosanquet asserted at the outset that it was not, i. e., a relation between ideas. When we demand a justification for going farther than this, we find none except the claim of conscious thought that its nature is to know—a claim whose justice we have no possible means of testing, and which would not, even if admitted, be of the slightest value in deciding which particular judgment is true and which false.

Bosanquet's development of his subject has proved to be throughout the necessary logical outcome of the presuppositions with reference to reality from which he starts. The fundamental difficulty of erecting a theory of the knowledge-process upon such a basis is recognized by him at the start in a passage already quoted: "If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to lay hold of reality" (p. 2). But, in spite of this assertion, his fundamental conception of reality remains that of a system which does lie outside the thought-process. His theory is an attempt to reconcile the essentially irreconcilable views that reality is outside of the thought-process, and that it is inside of the thought-process, and he succeeds only by calling upon our faith that so it is.

If it be true, as it seems to him to be, that we are compelled to adhere to both of these views of reality, then surely there is no other outcome. It means, however, that we finally resign all hope of knowing reality. We may have faith in its existence, but we have no way of deciding what particular judgment has reality in it as it should have it, and what as it should not. All stand (and fall) on the same basis. But does not Bosanquet himself point out a pathway which, if followed farther, would reach a more satisfactory view of the realm of knowledge? He has shown us that the only sort of reality we know, or can know, is the reality which appears within our judgment-process—the reality as known to us. Would it not be possible to drop the presupposed reality outside of the judgment-process (with which judgment is endeavoring to make connections) and content ourselves with the sort of reality which appears within the judgment-process? In other words, may there not be a satisfactory view of reality which frankly recognizes its organic relation to the knowledge-process, without at the same time destroying its value as reality? Is it possible to admit that reality is in a sense constituted in the judgment without making it at the same time the figment of the individual imagination—"a game with ideas"?

Let us assume for the moment that the real difficulty with Mr. Bosanquet's conception, the error that keeps him traveling in his hopeless circles, is the notion that truth is a matter of reference of ideas as such to reality as such, leading us to oscillate between the alternatives that either all ideas have such reference, and so are true, constitute knowledge; or else none have such reference, and so are false; or else are mere ideas to which neither truth nor falsity can be attributed. Let us ask if truth is not rather some specific relation within experience, something which characterizes one idea rather than another, so that our problem is not how an idea can refer to a reality beyond itself, but what are the marks by which we discriminate a true reference from a false one. Then let us ask for the criterion used in daily life and in science by which to test reality.

If we ask the philosophically unsophisticated individual why he believes that his house still exists when he is away from it and has no immediate evidence of the fact, he will tell you it is because he has found that he can go back to it time and again and see it and walk into it. It never fails him when he acts upon the assumption that it is there. He would never tell you that he believed in its existence when he was not experiencing it because his mental picture of his house stood for and represented accurately an object in the real world which was nevertheless of a different order of existence from his mental picture. When you ask the physicist why he believes that the laws of motion are true, he will tell you that it is because he finds that bodies always do behave according to them. He can predict just what a body will do under given circumstances. He is never disappointed however long he takes it for granted that the laws of motion are true and that bodies behave according to them. The only thing that could make him question their truth would be to find some body which did not prove to behave in accordance with them. The criterion is the same in both cases. It is the practical criterion of what as a matter of fact will work. That which can safely be taken for granted as a basis for further action is regarded as real and true. It remains real so long, and only so long, as it continues to fulfil this condition. As soon as it ceases to do so, it ceases to be regarded as real. When a man finds that he can no longer obtain the accustomed experience of seeing and entering his house, he ceases to regard it as real. It has burned down, or been pulled down. When a physicist finds that a body does not, as a matter of fact, behave as a given law leads him to expect it would behave, he ceases to regard the law as true.

The contrast between the naïve view of the criterion of reality and the one we have just been discussing may be brought out by considering how we should have to interpret from each standpoint the constant succession of facts in the history of science which have ceased to be facts. For illustration take the former fact that the earth is flat. It ceased to be a fact, says the theory we have been reviewing, because further thought-constructions of the real world convinced us that there is no reality which the idea "flat-world" represents. The idea "round-world" alone reproduces reality. It ceased to be a fact, says the naïve view, because it ceased to be a safe guide for action. Men found they could sail around the world. Correspondence in one case is pictorial, and its existence or non-existence can, as we have seen, never be ascertained. In the other, correspondence is response, adjustment, the co-meeting of specific conditions in further constituting of experience.

In actual life, therefore, the criterion of reality which we use is a practical one. The test of reality does not consist in ascertaining the relationship between an idea and an x which is not idea, but in ascertaining what experience can be taken for granted as a safe basis for securing other experiences. The evident advantage of the latter view, leaving aside for the moment the question of its adequacy in other respects, is that it avoids the fundamental skepticism at once suggested by the former. How can we ever be sure that the fact which we have discovered will stand the test of further thought-constructions? Perhaps it comes no nearer to reality than the discarded one. Obviously we never can be sure that any particular content of thought represents reality so accurately and perfectly that it will never be subject to revision. If, however, the test of reality is the adequacy of a given content of consciousness as a stimulus to action, as a mode of control, we have an applicable standard. A given content of consciousness is real—is a fact—so long as the act resulting from it is adequate in adaptation to other contents. It ceases to be real as soon as the act it stimulates proves to be inadequate.

The view which places the ultimate test of facts, not in any relationship of contents or existences, but in the practical outcome of thought, is the one which seems to follow necessarily from a thoroughgoing conception of the judgment as a function—an act. Our fundamental biological conception of the activities of living organisms is that acts exist for the sake of their results. Acts are always stimulated by some definite set of conditions, and their value is always tested by the adequacy with which they meet this set of conditions. The judgment is no exception to the rule. It is always an act stimulated by some set of conditions which needs readjusting. Its outcome is a readjustment whose value is and can be tested only by its adequacy. It is accordingly entirely in line with our reigning biological conceptions to expect to find the ultimate criterion of truth and reality in the practical outcome of thought, and to seek for an understanding of the nature of the "real" and of the "ideal" within the total activity of judgment.

One difficulty besets us at the outset of such an investigation—that of being sure that we have a genuine judgment under examination. A large portion of the so-called judgments considered by logicians, even by those who emphasize the truth that a judgment is an act, are really not judgments at all, but contents of thought which are the outcome of judgments—what might be called dead judgments, instead of live judgments. When we analyze a real act of judgment, as it occurs in a living process of thought, we find given elements which are always present. There is always a certain situation which demands a reaction. The situation is always in part determined and taken for granted, and in part questioned. It is determined in so far as it is a definite situation of some sort; it is undetermined in so far as it furnishes an inadequate basis for further action and therefore comes to consciousness as a problem. For example, take one of the judgments Bosanquet uses. "This is bread." We have first to inquire when such a judgment actually occurs in the living process of thought. A man does not make such a judgment in the course of his thinking unless there is some instigation to do so. Perhaps he is in doubt as to whether the white object he perceives is bread or cake. He wants some bread, but does not want cake. A closer inspection convinces him that it is bread, and the finished judgment is formulated in the proposition: "This is bread." What is the test of the reality of the bread, and the truth of the judgment? Evidently the act based on it. He eats the bread. If it tastes like bread and affects him like bread, then the bread was real and the judgment true. If, on the other hand, it does not taste like bread, or if it makes him violently ill, then the "bread" was not real and the judgment was false. In either case, the "this"—the experience to be interpreted—is unquestioned. The man does not question the fact that he has a perception of a white object. So much is taken for granted and is unquestioned within that judgment. But there is another part of the experience which is questioned, and which remains tentative up to the conclusion of the act of judgment; that is the doubt as to whether the perceived white object is bread or something else. Every live judgment, every judgment as it normally occurs in the vital process of thought, must have these phases. It is only when a judgment is taken out of its context and reduced to a mere memorandum of past judgments that it fails to reveal such parts. The man may, of course, go farther back. He may wonder whether this is really white or not. But he falls back then on something else which he takes unquestioningly—a "this" experience of some sort or other.

So far we have considered the practical criterion of reality merely as the one which is actually operative in everyday life, and as the one suggested by our biological theory of the functions of living organisms. It also offers a suggestion for the modified view of the nature of reality for which we are in search. Our previous discussion brought out incidentally a contradiction in the traditional theory of the nature of reality which it will be worth while to consider further. In dealing with the subject of the judgment, reality seemed to be made synonymous with fact. In this sense fact, or the real, was set off against the ideal. Knowledge was viewed as the correspondence between real and ideal. When we came to deal with the ideal itself—with the predicate of the judgment—there appeared in it an element of fact or reality which proved a serious stumbling-block for the theory. As image in my mind, the idea is just as real as the so-called facts; but this sort of reality according to the theory in question is neither the reality about which we are judging nor a real quality of it. Both Bradley and Bosanquet are forced to admit that the judgment ignores it, and is in so far by nature inadequate to its appointed task of knowing reality.

The suggestion which the situation offers for a new theory is that the view of reality has been too narrow. Reality must evidently be a broad enough term to cover both fact and idea. If so, the reality must be nothing more nor less than the total process of experience with its continual opposition of fact and idea, and their continual resolution through activity. That which previous theory has been calling the real is not the total reality, but merely one aspect of it. The problem of relation of fact and idea is thus the problem of the relation of one form of reality to another, and so a determinate soluble one, not a merely metaphysical or general one. Granting this, does it still remain true that reality in the narrower sense, reality as fact, can be regarded as a different order of existence from the ideal, and set over against the thought-process? Evidently not. Fact and idea become merely two aspects of a total reality. The way in which fact and idea are distinguished has already been suggested by the practical and biological criterion of fact, or reality in the narrower sense. From this point of view, fact is not a different order of existence from idea, but is merely a part of the total process of experience which functions in a given way. It is merely that part of experience which is taken as given, and which serves as a stimulus to action. Thus the essential nature of fact, or reality in the popular sense, falls not at all on the side of its content, but on the side of its function. Similarly the ideal is merely that part of the total experience which is taken as tentative. There is no problem as to how either of them is related to reality. In this relationship they are reality. That which previous theories had been calling the whole of reality now appears as merely one aspect of it—the fact aspect—artificially isolated from the rest.

When we translate this view of the nature of reality into terms of a theory of the judgment, we find that we can agree with Bosanquet in his definition of a judgment. It is an act, and an act which refers an ideal content to reality. The judgment must be an act, because it is essentially an adaptation—a reaction toward a given situation. The subject of the judgment is that part of the content of experience which represents the situation to be reacted to. It is that which is taken for granted as given in each case. Now this is, as we have seen, reality—in the narrower sense of that term. What Bosanquet has been calling reality now appears merely as the subject of the judgment taken out of its normal function and considered as an isolated thing. It is an artificial abstraction. It is accordingly true, as Bosanquet insists, that the subject of the judgment must always be reality—both in his sense of the term and in ours. This reality is not real, however, by virtue of its independence from the judgment, but by virtue of its function within the judgment. His fundamental problem with reference to the subject of the judgment is disposed of from this point of view. The subject is wholly within the judgment, not in any sense outside of it; but it is at the same time true that the subject of the judgment is reality. The fact that the subjects of all judgments—even those of the most elementary type—bear evident marks of the work done by thought upon them, ceases to be a problem. The subject is essentially a thing constituted by the doubt-inquiry process, and functioning within it. The necessity for an intermediate real world as it is to me between the real world and the knowing process disappears, because the real world as it is to me is the only real world of which the judgment can take account. There is no longer any divorce between the content of the subject and its existence. Reality in his sense of the term—reality as fact—does not fall on the side of existence in distinction from content, but on the side of function in distinction from content.

The predicate of the judgment is that part of the total experience which is taken as doubtful, or tentative. As we have seen, every act of adaptation involves a definite situation to be reacted to (subject) and an indefinite or tentative material with which to react (predicate). We have pointed out that a situation which demands a judgment never appears in consciousness as mere questioned or questionable situation.[52] There is always present, as soon as the doubt arises, some sort of tentative solution. This is the predicate or idea. Just as the fact, or real in the narrower sense, is that which is taken as given in the situation, so the ideal is that which is taken as tentative. Its ideality does not consist in its reference to another order of existence, the objective world of meanings, but in its function within the judgment, the estimate of the whole situation as leading up to the adequate act. Just as we no longer have any need for the mediation of the real world as known to me between subject and reality, so we no longer need the objective world of meanings to bridge the chasm between the predicate and reality. The difficulty of understanding how ideas can be used to build up facts disappears when we regard fact and idea, not as different orders of existence, but as contents marking different phases of a total function.

Ideas, as Bosanquet represented them, proved to be extremely unsatisfactory tools to use in building up a knowledge of reality. In the first place, their value as instruments of thought depends upon their universality. We have already reviewed Bosanquet's difficulties in attempting to explain the universality of ideas. The universality of an idea cannot reside in its mere existence as image. Its existence is purely particular. Its universality must reside in its reference to something outside of itself. But no explanation of how the particular existence—image—could refer to another and fuller content of a different order of existence could be discovered. The fact of reference remained an ultimate mystery. From the new point of view the image gains its universality through its organizing function. It represents an organized habit which may be brought to bear upon the present situation, and which serves, by directing action, to organize and unify experience as a whole. It is only as function that the concept of reference can be made intelligible.

Of course, considered as content, the idea is just as particular from this point of view as from any other. We still have to discuss the question as to whether or not the particularity of the idea has a logical value. The fact that it had none in Bosanquet's theory sets a limit to the validity of thought. But if the real test of the validity of a judgment is the act in which it issues, then the existential aspect of the idea must have logical value. The existential aspect of the idea is the "my" side of it. It is as my personal experience that it exists. But it is only as my idea that it has any impulsive power, or can issue in action. Far from being ignored, therefore, the existential aspect is essential to the logical, the determinative, value of an idea.

Ideas, according to the representational theory of knowledge, proved to be a poor medium for knowing reality in still another respect. They are in their very nature contents that have been reduced from the fulness of experience to mere index-signs. Even though their reference to a fuller content in the objective world of meanings presented no problem, still this objective world of meanings is far removed from reality. And yet, in order to know, we must be able to affirm ideas of reality. On the functional theory of ideas, their value does not rest at all upon their representational nature. They are not taken either in their existence or in their meaning as representations of any other content. They are taken as contents which mark a given function, and their value is determined entirely by the adequacy of the function of which they are the conscious expression. Their content may be as meager as you please. It may have been obtained by a long process of reducing and transforming sensory experience, but if it serve to enable its possessor to meet the situation which called it up with the appropriate act, then it has truth and value in the fullest sense. The reduction of the idea to a mere index-sign presents no problem when we realize that it is the tool of a given function, not the sign for a different and fuller content. The idea thus becomes a commendable economy in the thought-process, rather than a reprehensible departure from reality.

We have already upon general considerations criticised the point of view which holds that ideality consists in reference to another content. In arguing that this reference cannot be primarily to reality itself, but rather to an intermediate world of meanings, Bosanquet cites the question and the negative judgment. In the question ideas are not affirmed of reality, and in negation they are definitely denied of reality, hence their reference cannot be to reality. It must therefore be to an objective world of meanings. It may be worth while to point out in passing that, from the functional point of view, the part played by ideas in the question and in negative judgment is the same that it is in affirmation.

We have brought out the fact that all judgment arises in a doubt. The earliest stage of judgment is accordingly a question. Whether the process stops at that point, or is carried on to an affirmation or negation, depends upon the particular conditions. The ideas which appear in questions present no other problem than those of affirmation. They are ideas, not by virtue of their reference to another content in the world of meanings, but by virtue of their function, i. e., that of constituting that part of the total experience which is taken as doubtful, and hence as in process.

In order to make this point clear with reference to negative judgments, it will be necessary to consider the relation of negative and positive judgments somewhat more in detail. All judgment is in its earliest stages a question, but a question is never mere question. There are always present some suggestions of an answer, which make the process really a disjunctive judgment. A question might be defined as a disjunctive judgment in which one member of the disjunction is expressed and the others implied. If the process goes on to take the form of affirmation or negation, one of the suggested answers is selected. To follow out the illustration of the bread used above, the judgment arises in a doubt as to the nature of the white object perceived, but the doubt never takes the form of a blank question. It at once suggests certain possible solutions drawn from the mass of organized experience at the command of the person judging. At this stage the judgment is disjunctive. In the illustration it would probably take the form: "This is either bread or cake." The further course of the judgment rejects the cake alternative, and selects the bread, and the final outcome of the judgment is formulated in the proposition: "This is bread." But how did it happen that it did not take the form: "This is not cake"? That proposition is also involved in the outcome, and implied in the judgment made. The answer is that the form taken by the final outcome depends entirely on the direction of interest of the person making the judgment. If his interest happened to lie in obtaining bread, then the outcome would naturally take the form: "This is bread," and his act would consist in eating it. If he happened to want cake, the natural form would be, "This is not cake," and his act would consist in refraining from eating. In other words, the question as to whether a judgment turns out to be negative or positive is a question of whether the stress of interest happens to fall on the selected or on the rejected portions of the original disjunction. Every determination of a subject through a predicate includes both. The selection of one or the other according to interest affects the final formulation of the process, but does not change the relations of its various phases. An idea in a negative judgment is just what it is in a positive judgment. In neither case is it constituted an idea by reference to some other content.

So far we have outlined Bosanquet's theory of the judgment; have noted the apparently insoluble problems inherent in his system, and have sketched a radically different theory which offered a possible solution for his difficulties. It now remains to develop the implications of the new theory further by comparing its application to some of the more important problems of logic with that of Bosanquet. In closing we shall have to inquire to what extent the new theory of the judgment with its metaphysical implications has proved more satisfactory than that of Bosanquet.

The special problems to be considered are (1) the relation of judgment to inference; (2) the parts of the judgment and their relationship; (3) the time element in the judgment; and (4) the way in which one judgment can be separated from another.

1. The discussion of the relation between judgment and inference comes up incidentally in Bosanquet's treatment of the distinction between a judgment and a proposition (p. 79). The proposition, he says, is merely the enunciative sentence which represents the act of thought called judgment. With this distinction we should agree. In his discussion of the point, however, he criticises Hegel's doctrine that a judgment is distinguished from a proposition in that a judgment maintains itself against a doubt, while a proposition is a mere temporal affirmation, not implying the presence of a doubt. The ground of his criticism is that judgment must be regarded as operative before the existence of a conscious doubt, and that, while it is true, as Hegel suggests, that judgment and inference begin together, they both begin farther back than the point at which conscious doubt arises. Doubt marks the point at which inference becomes conscious of its ground. Now, it is undoubted that inferences in which the ground is implicit exist at an earlier stage of experience than those in which it is explicit. The former we usually call simple apprehension, and the latter judgment. What Bosanquet wishes to do is to make the term "judgment" cover both the implicit and the explicit activities. The question at once arises whether such a use of terms is accurate. There is certainly a wide difference between an inference which is conscious of its ground, and one which is not. It is conceivably a distinction of philosophic importance. To slur the difference by applying one name to both accomplishes nothing. It will be remembered that the presence of a conscious doubt is the criterion of judgment adopted in the standpoint from which we have been criticising Bosanquet's theory. We should accordingly make the term "inference" a wider one than the term "judgment." A judgment is an inference which is conscious of its ground. Since fact and idea have been represented as constituted in and through judgment, the question which at once suggests itself is: What, from such a standpoint, is the criterion of fact and idea in the stage of experience previous to the appearance of judgment? The answer is that the question involves the psychological fallacy. There is no such distinction as fact and idea in experience previous to the appearance of judgment. The distinction between fact and idea arises only at the higher level of experience at which inference becomes conscious of its grounds. To ask what they were previous to that is to ask what they were before they were—a question which, of course, cannot be answered.

Our reason for not adopting Hegel's distinction between a judgment and a proposition would accordingly not be the same as Bosanquet's. The question has already been touched upon in the distinction between dead and live judgments. What Hegel calls a proposition is really nothing but a dead judgment. His illustration of a temporal affirmation is the sentence: "A carriage is passing the house." That sentence would be a judgment, he says, only in case there were some doubt as to whether or not a carriage was passing. But the question to be answered first is: When would such a "statement" occur in the course of our experience? It is impossible to conceive of any circumstances in which it would naturally occur, unless there were some doubt to be solved either of our own or of another. Perhaps one is expecting a friend, and does not know at first whether it is a carriage or a cart which is passing. Perhaps some one has been startled, and asks: "What is this noise?" What Hegel wishes to call a proposition is, accordingly, nothing but a judgment taken out of its setting.

2. In dealing with the traditional three parts of the judgment—subject, predicate, and copula—Bosanquet disposes of the copula at once, by dividing the judgment into subject and predication. But the two terms "subject" and "predication" are not co-ordinate. Subject, as he uses it, is a static term indicating a content. Predication is a dynamic term indicating the act of predicating. It implies something which is predicated of something else, i. e., two contents and the act of bringing them into relation. Now, if what we understand by the copula is the act of predicating abstracted from the content which is predicated of another content, then it does not dispose of the copula as a separate factor in judgment to include thing predicated and act of predicating under the single term "predication." The term "predication" might just as reasonably be made to absorb the subject as well, and would then appear—as it really is—synonymous with the term "judgment."

But Bosanquet's difficulties with the parts of the judgment are not disposed of even by the reduction to subject and predication. He goes on to say:

We have already pointed out the difficulties into which Bosanquet's presupposition as to the nature of reality plunges him. This is but another technical statement of the same problem. If the subject is really outside of judgment, then the entire content of the judgment must fall on the side of predicate, or idea. In the paragraphs that follow, Bosanquet brings out the point that the judgment must nevertheless contain the distinction of subject and predicate, since it is impossible to affirm without introducing a distinction into the content of the affirmation. Yet he considers this distinction to be merely a difference within an identity. It serves to mark off the grammatical subject and predicate, but cannot be the essential distinction of subject and predicate. His solution of the puzzle is really the one for which we have been contending, i. e., that "the real world is primarily and emphatically my world," but he still cannot be satisfied with that kind of a real world as ultimate. Behind the subject which presents my world he postulates a real world which is not my world, but which my world represents. It is the relation between this real world and the total content of a judgment which he considers the essential relation of judgment. This leaves him—as we have pointed out—as far as ever from a theory of the relation of thought to reality, and, moreover, with no criterion for the distinction of subject and predicate within the judgment. To say that it is a difference within an identity does not explain how, on a mere basis of content, such a difference is distinguished within an identity or how it assumes the importance it actually has. He vibrates between taking the whole intellectual content as predicate, the reality to be represented as subject (in which case the copula would be the "contact of sense-perception") and a distinction appearing without reasonable ground or bearing within the intellectual content. When subject and predicate are regarded as the contents in which phases of a function appear, this difficulty no longer exists.

3. In discussing the time relations within judgment (p. 85) Bosanquet first disposes of the view which holds that the subject is prior to the predicate in time, and is distinguished from the predicate by its priority. He emphasizes the fact that no content of consciousness can have the significance of a subject, except with reference to something already referred to it as predicate. But while it cannot be true that the parts of the judgment fall outside of one another in time, it is yet evident that in one sense at least the judgment is in time. To make this clear, Bosanquet draws a provisional distinction between the process of arriving at a judgment and the completed judgment. The process of arriving at a judgment is a process of passing from a subject with an indefinite provisional predicate—a sort of disjunctive judgment—to a subject with a defined predicate. This process is evidently in time, but it is as evidently not a transition from subject to predicate. It is, as he says, a modification, pari passu, of both subject and predicate. The same distinction, he thinks, must hold of the judgment when completed. But this throws us into a dilemma with reference to the time-factor in judgment. Time either is or is not an essential factor in judgment. If it is not essential, then how explain the evident fact that the judgment as an intellectual process does have duration? If it is essential, then how explain the fact that its parts do not fall outside one another in time? Bosanquet evidently regards the former problem as the easier of the two. His solution is that, while the judgment is an intellectual process in time, still this is a purely external aspect. The essential relation between subject and predicate is not in time, since they are coexistent; therefore time is not an essential element in judgment.

The first point at which we take issue with this treatment of time in relation to judgment is in the distinction between the process of arriving at the judgment and the completed judgment. Bosanquet himself defines judgment as an intellectual act by which an ideal content is referred to reality. Now, at what point does this act begin? Certainly at the point where an ideal content is first applying to reality, and this, as he points out, is at the beginning of the process which he describes as the process of arriving at a judgment. It is nothing to the point that at this stage the predicate is tentative, while later it becomes defined. His process of arriving at the judgment is exactly the process we have been describing as the early stages of any and every judgment. When he talks about the judgment as completed, he has apparently shifted from the dynamic view of judgment implied in his definition to a static view. All he could mean by a completed judgment—in distinction to the total activity of arriving at a judgment—is the new content of which we find ourselves possessed when the total process of predication is complete. But this content is not a judgment at all. It is a new construction of reality which may serve either as subject or as predicate in future judgments.

Now, if we regard the judgment as the total activity by which an ideal content is referred to reality, then must we not regard time as an essential element? Bosanquet answers this question in the negative, because he believes that if time is an essential element, then the parts of the judgment must necessarily fall outside one another in time. But is this necessary? If the essence of judgment is the very modification, pari passu, of subject and predicate, then time must be an essential element in it, but it is not at all necessary that its elements should fall outside of one another in time. In other words, the dilemma which Bosanquet points out on p. 87 is not a genuine one. There is no difficulty involved in admitting that the judgment is a transition in time, and still holding that its parts do not fall outside one another in time. His own solution of the problem—i. e., that, although judgment is an intellectual process in time, still time is not an essential feature of it, because subject and predicate are coexistent and judgment is a relation between them—involves a desertion of his dynamic view of judgment. He defines judgment, not as a relation between subject and predicate, but as an intellectual act.[53]

4. The discussion of the time-element in judgment leads up to the next puzzle—that as to the way in which one judgment can be marked off from another in the total activity of thought. Bosanquet has pointed out that subject and predicate are both of them present at every stage of the judging process, and are undergoing progressive modification. If, therefore, we take a cross-section of the process at any point, we find both subject and predicate present; but a cross-section at one point would not reveal quite the same subject and predicate as the cross-section at another point. He comes to the conclusion that judgment breaks up into judgments as rhomboidal spar into rhomboids (p. 88). It is, accordingly, quite arbitrary to mark out any limits for a single judgment. The illustration he gives of the point is as follows: