6 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



(thing or being, material, moving, life, tree, animal, horse, etc.). 

 The act of judgment is thus an act by which we apprehend the 

 identity or non-identity of the objects of two previous apprehen 

 sions. It is an apprehensio complexa or complexorum as opposed 

 to the &quot; simple &quot; apprehension apprehensio incomplexa or incom- 

 plexorum by which we conceive an object in the abstract without 

 making any mental affirmation or denial about it. But conception 

 and judgment are fundamentally the same sort of mental act, an 

 intellectual intuition of what some thing is. 



So, too, is what logic calls the third act of the mind, the act of 

 reasoning or inference. This is the process by which our reason 

 so compares with one another the ideas and judgments it has 

 already formed that it thereby apprehends new relations between 

 the latter, and thus reaches fresh judgments and additional know 

 ledge or truth about things. Here, too, no less than in judgment, 

 the object apprehended by the intellect is a relation of identity or 

 difference between previously conceived objects : and this new 

 apprehension involves, of course, a fuller and better understanding 

 of what some thing is &amp;lt;( qucd quid est&quot; . 



Conception, judgment, and reasoning are, therefore, funda 

 mentally one and the same type of mental process the under 

 standing of the nature of a thing. They are all alike acts of the 

 same faculty the intellect or reason. 



4. RELATION OF UNIVERSAL IDEAS TO INDIVIDUAL THINGS. 

 Our senses, external and internal, are the channels through 

 which the things that make up the real world come into contact 

 with our minds. All our knowledge is gathered by Q\M judging 

 or interpreting intellectually the data revealed to our conscious 

 ness through the operation of our senses, and by reasoning from 

 those data. There is a philosophical aphorism : Nihil est in 

 intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu : which does not mean, of 

 course, that we can know nothing except the things actually re 

 vealed to our senses, i.e. material things ; but which does mean 

 that whatever we do know, even about suprasensible (or spiritual} 

 things, we know by reasoning intellectually from what is revealed 

 to our senses. The abstract and universal ideas themselves, by 

 which we interpret those sense data (e.g. the ideas of thing, matter, 

 motion, life, tree^ horse, etc.), we get by intellectual conception (or 

 abstraction] from those data. Precisely the same realities which 

 are apprehended by our senses as concrete, individual, determinate, 

 and incommunicable, are apprehended by our intellect in a state 



