20'2 ARTHUR O. LOVE JOY : subjective necessity of thinking the predicates together ; no other test can be either had or imagined. 1 Wolff, then, on the basis of this distinction between judg- ments a priori per essentialia and judgments per attributa, adds to the enumeration of the axioms (underlying mathematics and metaphysics) that are purely identical, another class, not clearly recognised by Leibniz of a ' pregnant ' or synthetical character. " Si defmitum sumitur ut subjectum, et de eo prsedicatur quidpiam, quod notis ad definitionem spectantibus, in ejus notione animo praesente, indivulso nexu cohaeret : pro- positio axioma est " (Philosophia rationalis sive logica, 273). In view of all this we may well ask, as Eberhard asked, to Kant's great irritation, shortly after the promulgation of the critical philosophy : How can one say that the so-called ' dogmatists ' neglected to undertake a preliminary Vernunft- kritik, or neglected to distinguish between analytic and syn- thetic judgments a priori, or neglected to show the logical justification of judgments of the latter sort? And if one accepts the principle upon which this last-mentioned justifi- cation rests, how is one entitled to reproach those who pro- fessed to found their metaphysics upon no other principle, for uncritical dogmatists ? These questions bring us to the essential issue upon the settlement of which must depend one's estimate of Kant's genuine originality and historic importance as an epistemol- ogist. Metaphysical methodology had culminated just before his time in an explicit limitation of all a priori philosophising within the range where the testing of propositions by the principle of contradiction, 2 in an enlarged sense, is possible, and in an equally explicit indication of just what that enlarged sense was to mean. It is, therefore, impossible for any one 1 Wolff puts it thus in his German logical treatise : " Wenn nun zwei Gedanken so beschaffen sind, class der andere notwendig statt findet, wenn man den ersten heget, oder dass ich mir das andere notwendig gedenken muss, wenn ich von eineni Dinge das erste gedenke, indem namlich durch das erstere das andere mil dtterminiret wird ; so stimmen die Gedanken mit einander uberein. Kann ich aber das andere von einem Dinge unmoglich gedenken, wenn ich rnir das erste von ihni gedenke : so streiten meine Gedanken wider einander, oder einer widerspricht dem andern " ( Verniinftige Gedanken von den Krdften des memchlicken Verstandes, 6** Aufl., 1731). 2 1 refer both forms of the a priori judgment, in the Wolffian classifica- tion, to the principle of contradiction, although the phraseology of different members of the school appears to be inconsistent upon this point. Eberhard, for example, prefers to label judgments priori per attributa as examples of the " principle of sufficient reason ". The ques- tion, however, is merely one of nomenclature ; and Wolff himself cer- tainly appears to me to intend the subsumption of both forms of a priori reasoning under the principle of contradiction.
