THE CATEGORIES OR &quot; PRAEDICAMENTA &quot;. 153 



and passive ; on the contrary all apprehension involves on the part of the 

 mind the relating to one another in various ways of the elements of what is 

 apprehended ; if the elements were not so related they would not be elements 

 of one object ; and they cannot be related except the mind at the same time 

 relates them, since relation exists only for consciousness.&quot; l From this it has 

 been inferred by later followers of Hegel s philosophy that &quot; Relation &quot; 

 is the one supreme category of knowledge. But while it is true that all 

 judging is a process of comparing or relating, it is also true that there are 

 many distinct and irreducible grounds and kinds of relation. 2 And the ulti 

 mate question remains as between realism and conceptualism (4, 5, 6) : Are 

 those ultimate grounds real? are they in the reality? and does an insight 

 into them reveal to the mind, so far as the latter apprehends them, the 

 nature of reality ? Or are they pure products of intellectual activity, mere 

 mental forms, an insight into which would reveal to us merely the nature of 

 our own cognitive processes, and not the nature of things? 



Apart from this profound problem of the ultimate metaphysical or real 

 significance of the categories, the latter are largely identical in the schemes 

 of Kant and Aristotle. Indeed, they must be largely identical in all systems 

 of philosophy, however philosophers may differ as to the derivative and re 

 ducible, or ultimate and irreducible, character of this or that particular 

 category : concepts such as those of substance, and quality, and relation, and 

 causality, and time, and space, are so broadly and clearly distinct, at the 

 foundations of human thought, that no philosophical analysis is ever likely 

 to eliminate any of them. 



JOYCE, Logic, chap. ix. JOSEPH, Logic, chap. iii. MERCIER, Logique, 

 pp. 96 sqq., 118 sqq. WELTON, Logic, i., chap. iv. 



1 JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 48. 



2 Cy. supra, 72, 75 ; JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 38, n. i. 



