The fact that judging and thinking so closely resemble each other has given just cause for some logicians to designate judging as the most fundamental element in all thinking. “The simplest form of thinking,” says Creighton, “is judging.” In order to think many notions into one class it is necessary to conjoin notions. To illustrate: The child who has a general notion of man sees for the first time a negro. If he recognizes the negro as a colored man he must conjoin his general notion of man with this individual notion. In short, a concept is built by means of a series of judgments. It may be said further that an inference is simply a _made-over judgment_. It is thus evident that judging appears in both the thought processes of conception and inference and, therefore, as a final conclusion it may be affirmed that judging, though perhaps not the simplest form of thinking, is the basic element of _developed_ thought.
Reasoning is the process of deriving a new judgment from a consideration of other judgments. The product of any reasoning process may be called an inference, although, as will appear in a later chapter, inference is commonly used as indicating the process as well as the product.
Often reasoning may assume a syllogistic form with the inference as its conclusion. A syllogism is an arrangement of three propositions using three different terms. The following are syllogisms:
(1) All children should play. Mary is a child. Hence, Mary should play.
(2) No teacher should judge hastily. You are a teacher. Hence, you should not judge hastily.
In the second syllogism the inference, “you should not judge hastily,” is derived from the other two judgments by merely eliminating the common term teacher and disjoining the remaining two terms. The inference is consequently a _new_ judgment. Therefore, reasoning is only a matter of judging carried to a more complex stage.
To summarize――_conception_ is largely a matter of conjoining a general notion with an individual notion, _judging_ of conjoining and disjoining all kinds of notions and _inference_ of conjoining and disjoining judgments. All three processes go to form the larger process of thinking. _The concept, the judgment and the inference are products arising from conjoining and disjoining notions._