it has to qualify and make good the Reality. And, as we have seen, its attempt would in the end be suicidal. Truth should mean what it stands for, and should stand for what it means; but these two aspects in the end prove incompatible. There is still a difference, unremoved, between the subject and the predicate, a difference which, while it persists, shows a failure in thought, but which, if removed, would wholly destroy the special essence of thinking.
We may put this otherwise by laying down that any categorical judgment must be false. The subject and the predicate, in the end, cannot either be the other. If however we stop short of this goal, our judgment has failed to reach truth; while, if we attained it, the terms and their relation would have ceased. And hence all our judgments, to be true, must become conditional. The predicate, that is, does not hold unless by the help of something else. And this “something else” cannot be stated, so as to fall inside even a new and conditional predicate.[1]
It is however better, I am now persuaded, not to say that every judgment is hypothetical.[2] The word, it is clear, may introduce irrelevant ideas. Judgments are conditional in this sense, that what they affirm is incomplete. It cannot be attributed to Reality, as such, and before its necessary complement is added. And, in addition, this complement in the end remains unknown. But, while it remains unknown, we obviously cannot tell how, if present, it would act upon and alter our predicate. For to suppose that its presence would make no difference is plainly absurd, while the precise nature of the
- ↑ I may, perhaps, refer here to my Principles of Logic. Even metaphysical statements about the Absolute, I would add, are not strictly categorical. See below Chapter xxvii.
- ↑ This term often implies the reality of temporal existence, and is also, apart from that, objectionable. See Mr. Bosanquet’s admirable Logic, I., Chapter vi.
