the whole, however, Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, purged from their errors, form one empirical school, gradually growing by adapting itself to the advance of science; a school in which Aristotle was most influenced by Greek deductive Mathematics, Bacon by the rise of empirical physics at the Renaissance, and Mill by the Newtonian combination of empirical facts and mathematical principles in the Principia. From studying this succession of empirical logicians, we cannot doubt that sense, memory and experience are the real origin of inference, analogical, inductive and deductive. The deepest problem of logic is the relation of sense and inference. But we must first consider the mental analysis of inference, and this brings us to conceptual and formal logic.
Aristotle’s logic has often been called formal logic; it was really a technical logic of syllogism analysed into linguistic elements, and of science rested on an empirical basis. At the same time his psychology, though maintaining his empiricism, contained some seeds of conceptual logic, and indirectly of formal logic. Intellectual development, which according to the logic of the Analytics consists of sense, memory, experience, induction and intellect, according to the psychology of the De Anima consists of sense, imagination and intellect, and one division of intellect is into conception of the undivided and combination of conceptions as one (De An. iii. 6). The De Interpretatione opens with a reference to this psychological distinction, implying that names represent conceptions, propositions represent combinations of conceptions. But the same passage relegates conceptions and their combinations to the De Anima, and confines the De Interpretatione to names and propositions in conformity with the linguistic analysis which pervades the logical treatises of Aristotle, who neither brought his psychological distinction between conceptions and their combinations into his logic, nor advanced the combinations of conceptions as a definition of judgment (κρίσις), nor employed the mental distinction between conceptions and judgments as an analysis of inference, or reasoning, or syllogism: he was no conceptual logician. The history of logic shows that the linguistic distinction between terms and propositions was the sole analysis of reasoning in the logical treatises of Aristotle; that the mental distinction between conceptions (ἔννοιαι) and judgments (ἀξιώματα in a wide sense) was imported into logic by the Stoics; and that this mental distinction became the logical analysis of reasoning under the authority of St Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary on the De Interpretatione, St Thomas, after citing from the De Anima Aristotle’s “duplex operatio intellectus,” said, “Additur autem et tertia operatio, scilicet ratiocinandi,” and concluded that, since logic is a rational science (rationalis scientia), its consideration must be directed to all these operations of reason. Hence arose conceptual logic; according to which conception is a simple apprehension of an idea without belief in being or not being, e.g. the idea of man or of running; judgment is a combination of conceptions, adding being or not being, e.g. man is running or not running; and reasoning is a combination of judgments: conversely, there is a mental analysis of reasoning into judgments, and judgment into conceptions, beneath the linguistic analysis of rational discourse into propositions, and propositions into terms. Logic, according to this new school, which has by our time become an old school, has to co-ordinate these three operations, direct them, and, beginning with conceptions, combine conceptions into judgments, and judgments into inference, which thus becomes a complex combination of conceptions, or, in modern parlance, an extension of our ideas. Conceptual logicians were, indeed, from the first aware that sense supplies the data, and that judgment and therefore inference contains belief that things are or are not. But they held, and still hold that sensation and conception are alike mere apprehensions, and that the belief that things are or are not arises somehow after sensation and conception in judgment, from which it passes into inference. At first, they were more sanguine of extracting from these unpromising beginnings some knowledge of things beyond ideas. But at length many of them became formal logicians, who held that logic is the investigation of formal thinking, or consistent conception, judgment and reasoning; that it shows how we infer formal truths of consistency without material truth of signifying things; that, as the science of the form or process, it must entirely abstract from the matter, or objects, of thought; and that it does not tell us how we infer from experience. Thus has logic drifted further and further from the real and empirical logic of Aristotle the founder and Bacon the reformer of the science.
The great merit of conceptual logic was the demand for a mental analysis of mental reasoning, and the direct analysis of reasoning into judgments which are the sole premises and conclusions of reasoning and of all mental inferences. Aristotle had fallen into the paradox of resolving a mental act into verbal elements. The Schoolmen, however, gradually came to realize that the result to their logic was to make it a sermocionalis scientia, and to their metaphysics the danger of nominalism. St Thomas made a great advance by making logic throughout a rationalis scientia; and logicians are now agreed that reasoning consists of judgments, discourse of propositions. This distinction is, moreover, vital to the whole logic of inference, because we always think all the judgments of which our inference consists, but seldom state all the propositions by which it is expressed. We omit propositions, curtail them, and even express a judgment by a single term, e.g. “Good!” “Fire!”. Hence the linguistic expression is not a true measure of inference; and to say that an inference consists of two propositions causing a third is not strictly true. But to say that it is two judgments causing a third is always true, and the very essence of inference, because we must think the two to conclude the third in “the sessions of sweet silent thought.” Inference, in short, consists of actual judgments capable of being expressed in propositions.
Inference always consists of judgments. But judgment does not always consist of conceptions. It is not a combination of conceptions; it does not arise from conceptions, nor even at first require conception. Sense is the origin of judgment. One who feels pained or pleased, who feels hot or cold or resisting in touch, who tastes the flavoured, who smells the odorous, who hears the sounding, who sees the coloured, or is conscious, already believes that something sensible exists before conception, before inference, and before language; and his belief is true of the immediate object of sense, the sensible thing, e.g. the hot felt in touch. But a belief in the existence of something is a judgment and a categorical judgment of existence. Sense, then, outer and inner, or sensation and consciousness, is the origin of sensory judgments which are true categorical beliefs in the existence of sensible things; and primary judgments are such true categorical sensory beliefs that things exist, and neither require conception nor are combinations of conceptions. Again, since sense is the origin of memory and experience, memorial and experiential judgments are categorical and existential judgments, which so far as they report sensory judgments are always true. Finally, since sense, memory and experience are the origin of inference, primary inference is categorical and existential, starting from sensory, memorial and experiential judgments as premises, and proceeding to inferential judgments as conclusions, which are categorical and existential, and are true, so far as they depend on sense, memory and experience.
Sense, then, is the origin of judgment; and the consequence is that primary judgments are true, categorical and existential judgments of sense, and primary inferences are inferences from categorical and existential premises to categorical and existential conclusions, which are true so far as they arise from outer and inner sense, and proceed to things similar to sensible things. All other judgments and inferences about existing things, or ideas, or names, whether categorical or hypothetical, are afterthoughts, partly true and partly false.
Sense, then, because it involves a true belief in existence is fitted to be the origin of judgment. Conception on the other hand is the simple apprehension of an idea, particular or universal, but without belief that anything is or is not, and therefore is unfitted to beget judgment. Nor could a combination of conceptions make a difference so fundamental as that between conceiving and believing. The most that it could do would be to cause an ideal judgment, e.g. that the idea of a centaur is the idea of a man-horse; and even here some further origin is needed for the addition of the copula “is.”
So far from being a cause, conception is not even a condition of all judgments; a sensation of hot is sufficient evidence that hot exists, before the idea of hot is either present or wanted. Conception is, however, a condition of a memorial judgment: in order to remember being hot, we require an idea of hot. Memory, however, is not that idea, but involves a judgment that there previously existed the hot now represented by the idea, which is about the sensible thing beyond the conceived idea; and the cause of this
