Page:Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays.djvu/235

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KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE
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to discover the meaning of a judgment nominally about him, I am not saying that we must substitute an idea. Suppose our description is "the man whose name was Julius Cæsar." Let our judgment be "Julius Cæsar was assassinated." Then it becomes "the man whose name was Julius Cæsar was assassinated." Here Julius Cæsar is a noise or shape with which we are acquainted, and all the other constituents of the judgment (neglecting the tense in "was") are concepts with which we are acquainted. Thus our judgment is wholly reduced to constituents with which we are acquainted, but Julius Cæsar himself has ceased to be a constituent of our judgment. This, however, requires a proviso, to be further explained shortly, namely that "the man whose name was Julius Cæsar" must not, as a whole, be a constituent of our judgment, that is to say, this phrase must not, as a whole, have a meaning which enters into the judgment. Any right analysis of the judgment, therefore, must break up this phrase, and not treat it as a subordinate complex which is part of the judgment. The judgment "the man whose name was Julius Cæsar was assassinated" may be interpreted as meaning "one and only one man was called Julius Cæsar, and that one was assassinated." Here it is plain that there is no constituent corresponding to the phrase "the man whose name was Julius Cæsar." Thus there is no reason to regard this phrase as expressing a constituent of the judgment, and we have seen that this phrase must be broken up if we are to be acquainted with all the constituents of the judgment. This conclusion, which we have reached from considerations concerned with the theory of knowledge, is also forced upon us by logical considerations, which must now be briefly reviewed.

It is common to distinguish two aspects, meaning and