regard to its being there. When I say “this horse is a mammal,” it is surely absurd to suppose that I am harnessing my mental state to the beast between the shafts. Judgment adds an adjective to reality, and this adjective is an idea, because it is a quality made loose from its own existence, and is working free from its implication with that. And, even when a fact is merely analysed,—when the predicate appears not to go beyond its own subject, or to have been imported divorced from another fact outside—our account still holds good. For here obviously our synthesis is a re-union of the distinguished, and it implies a separation, which, though it is overridden, is never unmade. The predicate is a content which has been made loose from its own immediate existence and is used in divorce from that first unity. And, again, as predicated, it is applied without regard to its own being as abstracted and in my head. If this were not so, there would be no judgment; for neither distinction nor predication would have taken place. But again, if it is so, then once more here we discover an idea.
And in the second place, when we turn to the subject of the judgment, we clearly find the other aspect, in other words, the “that.” Just as in “this horse is a mammal” the predicate was not a fact, so most assuredly the subject is an actual existence. And the same thing holds good with every judgment. No one ever means to assert about anything but reality, or to do anything but qualify a “that” by a “what.” And, without dwelling on a point which I have worked out elsewhere,[1] I will notice a source of possible mistake. “The subject, at all events,” I may be told, “is in no case a mere ‘that.’ It is never bare reality, or existence without character.” And to this I fully assent. I agree that the subject which we mean—even before the judgment is com-
- ↑ Principles of Logic, Book I.
