Therefore, to draw our conclusion as to the Unity of the Judgment, it is not a transition from one mental state to another; the relation of which it consists is not between ideas in it, but is the content of the idea which forms it. Judgment is not primarily comparison between two things; it is a thing or content displayed as possessing some definite relation or quality within its identity. Every Judgment is the content of one idea, but you may of course distinguish relations between ideal elements within this idea. “Fire causes heat” is a single content or idea, the nature of fire, expanded into one of its properties.
_Distinction between Subject and Predicate_
5. But then, if the whole Judgment is a single content, what is the difference between Subject and Predicate, and is it necessary to distinguish Subject from Predicate at all? If _some_ Judgments can be made without explicit Subjects, cannot _all_ be made in that way?
This suggestion is very useful as carrying on the simplest type of Judgment throughout the whole theory of Judgment. By a little torture of expression any Judgment can be thrown into a form in which undefined Reality is the general subject, and the whole mass of the Judgment is the Predicate. “William Pitt was a great statesman” = “There was a great statesman named William Pitt”; “The three angles of every triangle are equal to two right angles” = “There are figures known as triangles with their three angles equal to two right angles”; “All citizens are members of a moral order” = “There is a moral order, including the { 108} relations of citizenship”; “All trespassers will be prosecuted” = “Here are conditions which ensure the prosecution of possible trespassers.” Or you might always put a subject, “Reality is such that”--“Reality is characterised by.”
Thus we see that, as we have said before, in every Judgment the ultimate subject is Reality, the world in contact with us as we have already qualified it by previous Judgment. It is a less mistake to reject the Subject and Predicate in the Judgment altogether, than to think that they are separate things or ideas, and that in judging you pass or change from one to the other. Always bear in mind that it is possible to mass the whole Judgment as a single Predicate directly or indirectly true of Reality.