We have got, then, as the active elements in Judgment a Subject in Reality, the meaning of an idea, and an identity between them.
Is this enough? Have we the peculiar act of affirmation wherever we have these conditions?
This is not the question by what elements of language the judgment is rendered. We shall speak of that in the next lecture. The question is now, simply, “Is a significant idea, referred to reality, always an assertion?”
The first answer seems to be that such an idea is always _in_ an assertion, but need not constitute the whole of an { 73} assertion. If we think of a subject in judgment which is represented by a relative sentence, it seems clear that any idea which can stand a predicate can also form a part of a subject. “The exhibition which it is proposed to hold at Chicago in 1893”--has in effect just the same elements of meaning, and just the same reference to a point in our world of reality as if the sentence ran, “It is proposed to hold an exhibition at Chicago in 1893.” In common parlance we should say, that in the former case we entertain an idea--or conceive or represent it--while in the latter case we affirm it.
But if we go on to say that the former kind of sentence as truly represents the nature of thought as the latter, then it seems that we are mistaken. Even language does not admit such a clause to the rank of an independent sentence.
If we insist on considering it in its isolation, we probably eke it out in thought by an unarticulated affirmation such as that which constitutes an impersonal judgment; in other words, we affirm it to belong to reality under some condition which remains unspecified. Thus the linguistic form of the relative clause, as also the separate existence of the spoken or written word, produces an illusion which has governed the greater part of logical theory so far as concerns the separation between concept and judgment, _i.e._ between entertaining ideas and affirming them in reality. In our waking life, all thought is judgment, every idea is referred to reality, and in being so referred, is ultimately affirmed of reality. The separation of elements in the texture of Judgment into Subjects and Predicates which, as separated, are conceived as _possible_ Subjects and Predicates, is therefore { 74} theoretical and ideal, an analysis of a living tissue, not an enumeration of loose bricks out of which something is about to be built up.