CHAPTER VI.

JUDGMENTS.

§ 80. Judgments are deductions or inferences from other ideas; and are themselves a prolific source of ideas. From sensations and consciousness we obtain perceptions both of natural and spiritual objects. Having obtained these perceptions, and discovered the objects to which they relate, we infer other objects from them; and from these objects others still, to an indefinite extent. The faculty of inferring some objects from others is similar to that of inferring objects in the first place from sensations and consciousness. This faculty is denominated judgment, and sometimes reason. It is called judgment, because it is exercised in deciding on civil and criminal cases in courts of justice, and in forming conclusions on the ground of evidences generally. It is called reason, because it is exercised in discovering reasons for things, and in tracing effects to their causes. By whatever name it is called, it is the original and primary department of the faculty of ideas or the power of thinking. The power of thinking, in its elementary, simple and original exercise, is the power of judging, or of inferring objects from phenomena, and from other objects. This power belongs to the human mind by virtue of its constitution, just as the capacity of sensation belongs to it, and is one of the original indispensable elements of human and animal

natures.

§ 81. Judgment is a power not of analyzing ideas only, but of forming them; and not of forming ideas arbitrarily, but in correspondence to things.

Ideas of judgment are in their nature dependent on things, and are exercises of mind, having reference to things in the different points of view, and the different relations, in which the mind comes in contact with them. If there had not been the thing, material substance, operating on the organs of sense, the mind could have had no idea of material substance; if there had not been the thing, mind, acting as a subject of consciousness, the mind could have had no idea of mind; if there had not been the things, time and space, developed and revealed by sensations and consciousness,

the mind could have had no ideas of time and space. The same may be said of all the mind's judgments. They are the product of things, which directly or indirectly produce them, and relate to those things as the objects of thought.

$82. The dependence of the mind on things as the conditions of its judgments, is similar to its dependence on organic impressions as the conditions of its sensations. Sensations furnish the primary conditions of knowledge, but not one of its elements. The elements of knowledge are judgments. By overlooking this, the progress of mental science has been essentially retarded, and its purity essentially impaired. It has been a common theory, that the elements of all knowledge are furnished by the senses and consciousness. On this theory Hume based his system of skepticism, and restricted the limits of human knowledge to objects of sense and consciousness, undermining the foundations of all human faith in things beyond this narrow sphere. Within the domain of sensation and consciousness, he allowed us knowledge; all beyond this he characterized as hypothesis and conjecture. The world was startled with the novelty of his conclusions, and shocked with their impiety. He was seen to aim a fatal blow at all the acknowledged and time-honored foundations of religious belief and moral virtue; and to lay the dearest hopes and fondest anticipations of the human race, prostrate in the dust. The human heart shrunk with horror from so dark and dreary a system; and human reason, without stopping to analyze it, and without waiting to discover the precise points of its departure from the highway of truth, pronounced it false and dangerous. This system was immediately met and confuted on the authority of reason and common sense, and was shown to lead to conclusions which the human mind could not admit. Such a confutation answered to some extent the great purposes of practical reason, but it was not the satisfaction that the human mind required; it silenced skepticism without fully satisfying reason. The fact of a field of knowledge beyond the domain of sense and consciousness, was established, but the problem of the origin and attainment of that knowledge, was left unsolved and untouched. Reason, whose province it is to resolve difficulties, not merely to confront them with greater difficulties; whose province it is from facts to ascend to causes, and from actions to agents and principles of action, while

it admitted perception of objects beyond the sphere of sense and consciousness as facts, persisted in its demand of an explanation of those facts.

83. The first man whom Providence raised up to meet this demand, and fearlessly to grapple with all the difficulties of this great subject, was Kant. With a boldness and strength of conception which have never been surpassed, and with powers of the most refined analysis and the most accurate and comprehensive reasoning, he first grasped the problem itself, in its broad extent and profound depths, and then set himself deliberately at work to resolve it, to meet all its conditions, and satisfy all its demands. It is not awarding him too much praise to say, that he accomplished this object perfectly; and that he thereby obtained for philosophy one of the noblest triumphs of the human mind. Had he stopped with the solution of this problem, and modestly added it to the previously established principles of mental science, without undertaking to re-construct the whole system; had he found among previously established principles, the proper place to be occupied and filled by his own immortal discoveries, and placed them there, without derogating from the value and reality of all previous knowledge, his services in the cause of science would have been much greater than they now are; and the general direction of his transcendent powers much more profitable. Had he done this, he would have taken rank in Mental Philosophy, by the side of Newton in Natural Philosophy; and would have been not less than he, a guiding star to future ages in the science of his adoption, and the patriarch of a new dispensation of that science.

84. The skeptical philosophy of Hume was founded in a misconception of the nature and conditions of knowledge. It resolved the knowledge conditioned on sensations and consciousness, into sensations and consciousness; and denied the validity of all ideas, which could not be subjected to such an apparent analysis. . The true theory is, however, that the ideas supposed by Hume and others to be capable of being resolved into sensations and consciousness, are capable of no such solution; that sensations and consciousness are the conditions, not the elements of these ideas; and that these ideas are as valid conditions for other ideas, as the sensations and consciousness on which they depend are for them. We thus arrive at two results of the

highest practical and speculative interest. The first is, that ideas of the direct objects of perception, are judgments depending on sensation and consciousness, and are the mind's perception of things as they stand related to its exercises. of sensation and consciousness. The second is, that ideas of time, space, causality, and dependence, and other objects not given us by sensations or consciousness, are judgments depending ultimately on perceptions, and of equal objective validity with them. Perceptions derive their validity from sensations and consciousness; and ideas of other objects, from perceptions. The relation of perceptions to sensations and consciousness is that of dependence, and the relation of other ideas to perceptions is the same.

§85. The constancy and uniformity of ideas in like conditions, is not the evidence of their objective validity, but of the permanency and unchangableness both of the mind itself and of other objects. The objective validity both of the objects of perception and reason is the very thing which reason reveals, and is involved in every legitimate exercise of judgment.

$86. Judgments are either affirmative or negative, and may be resolved in subjects and predicates. Affirmative and negative judgments are founded on similar principles, and generally accompany each other. In affirmative judgments we infer that something is; in negative judgments we infer that something is not. The subject of a judgment is the thing concerning which we judge; the predicate, is what we judge concerning it. The phrase, Virtue is good, expresses a judgment. Virtue denotes the subject of that judgment; is good, expresses the predicate. Ideas denoted by the predicate of a judgment, are said to be predicated of the subject.

§ 87. Ideas are predicated of subjects on two grounds; first, on the ground that their objects are comprehended in the complex conception of the subject. Thus, goodness may be predicated of virtue, on the ground that the complex conception of virtue, relates to it as some thing good; evil may be predicated of vice, on the ground that the complex conception of vice relates to it, as something evil; and succession of parts may be predicated of time on the ground that the elementary conception of time relates to it as successive and so on. Judgments of this description are called analytical, because they are derived from the ideas of the subject

by analysis, and are really contained in those ideas. They are also called judgments à priori, because they are developed by analysis from previous judgments. They existed in complex ideas before, and are obtained from them by analysis.

§ 88. The second ground of judgment is some condition not contained in the mind's conception of the subject, as when we predicate goodness of a particular action from its effects, or attribute powers to particular agents from their actions, or refer parts to a whole, from observing that they constitute an entire object. Judgments of this description are called synthetic, or additive, because they add some element to our conception of the subject which was not previously contained in it. Synthetic judgments may be either à priori or à posteriori. They are à priori when they are derived from other ideas previously existing in the mind, and à posteriori. when they are derived from ideas subsequently obtained. We are the subjects of ideas relating to numerous objects. Our ideas of each of these objects may be modified from time to time by ideas derived from our ideas of other known objects, in proportion as we consider their mutual relations. When a new idea is introduced into the great family it may not at first become the occasion of the modification pre-existing ideas. After a while its object is compared with that of one and another, and another idea, and judgment after judgment is formed from it, creating a proportionable variety of new ideas, and adding new elements to old ones.

§ 89. The analytical and synthetic modes of reasoning both have their uses. By analytical judgments we develop and reproduce particular truths from general ones, and less general truths from more general ones. By synthetic judgments we discover truths not known before, and add to our pre-existing ideas the new discovered elements. In the order of nature synthetic reasoning is first, and is the essential condition of analytical reasoning. The object of synthetic reasoning is the acquisition of knowledge; and that of analytical reasoning is the preservation and use of knowledge already acquired, and the reduction of particular objects to their appropriate species and generic.

§ The logic of Aristotle is a system of analytical reasoning which does not give us new truth, but analyzes and reproduces old ones, by inferring ideas of the species from those of the genus and ideas of particular objects from those