(ii.) But further, understanding now that the Judgment is composed of a single ideal content, and is not a transition from one mental state to another, there is still a difficulty in the conception that its component elements are nothing but ideas. If the Subject in Judgment is no more than an ideal content, how, by what means, does the Judgment claim to be true of Reality? “The Subject cannot belong to the content or fall within it, for in that case it would be the idea attributed to itself.” [1] If the Subject were only a part of an ideal content it would not claim to be true of Reality, and where it _appears_ to be only an ideal content there is much dispute in what sense the Judgment does claim to be true of Reality. “Violations of a law of nature are impossible.” “The three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.” “All trespassers will be prosecuted.” In these Judgments we should find it hard to make out that the Subjects are real things corresponding to our ideas. And yet, if they are not, how can the Judgment attach itself to Reality? This is the difficult question of the distinction between the categorical and the hypothetical Judgment, and we shall have to return to it. In the meantime, we must adhere to our judgment of perception as the true underlying type. The Subject is here not an idea, but is the given reality, _this_ or _that_, and the Judgment is not a conjunction of two ideas, but is present reality qualified by an idea. We say, “It is very hot,” meaning that heat, the general quality embodied for us in an ideal content, is true of--forms one tissue with--the surroundings which here and now press upon our attention. Or again, “This is red,” { 104} _i.e._ the content of the idea red is what my attention selects and emphasises within the mass of detail presented to it in its own unique focus which the pronoun “this” simply points out as though with the finger. We shall find such a structure underlying all the more artificial forms of Judgment.
[1] _Bradley’s Principles of Logic_, p. 14.
(_b_) Thus it would seem that Jevons and Mill are much nearer the real point when they say that the proposition has to do with two Things, or with a Thing and a group of Things. But we must notice in passing that Mill, [1] after fighting hard against calling them Ideas, takes our breath away by saying that they are states of consciousness. There is, of course, a difficulty, which I will not try to deal with now, in the fact that however much we _refer_ to things, we have nothing to _work with intellectually_ but our ideas of them, and in some types of Judgment the reference to real things is difficult to trace. Mill further emphasises this by showing, that what we assert in ordinary _general_ Judgment is co-existence of attributes. [2] “Now when we say, Man is mortal, we mean that wherever these various mental and physical phenomena (the attributes of man) are all found, then we have assurance that the other physical and mental phenomenon called death, will not fail to take place.” That is, no doubt, a very indirect way of referring to the real things which we call men. Moreover, he treats all conclusions in geometry and mechanics as hypothetical. [3] All this we shall have to return to, in order to reconcile it with our doctrine; which is apparently coincident with { 105} Mill’s view in the place first alluded to, that the subject in Judgment is always reality.