ABSTRACT
Although we have not yet dealt with the higher forms of judgment, we have reached a stage where some of our results may be provisionally summed up, and certain difficulties that have been urged by various thinkers may be considered. Restricted as our view of the judgment has been, it may yet be enough to show us the broad characteristics of that act of thought. For we have in effect explained the essentials of the categorical judgment. It is true that having an eye to the conditions of thinking as well as its content, we have confined ourselves to cases in which the data are supplied by apprehension, memory, analysis, and construction. But the special function of the judgment is not altered by the source from which its materials are derived, and so if we understand what the categorical judgment does with its data in any one case, we understand it in all. Thus a simple assertion like “He is suffering from heart disease,” falls outside the classes of judgment that we have been considering in respect of its conditions. Heart disease is a conception that could only be built up by means of a concatenation of inferences, and obviously the symptoms on which the diagnosis rests in the present case are known as symptoms inferentially. But the general content is applied to the individual in the same way as before, though for different reasons. The individual is a case of the general, as before—only the nature of the individual or general contents used is different, and the grounds on which we connect them less immediate. The movement is the same in every categorical singular judgment, and we can now treat of the content of such judgments (apart from their conditions) in general. 1
