174 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



any such analysis of the objects of our thought, but must be sought 

 in extrinsic sources. Hence, also, these may be called with special 

 propriety a posteriori judgments, i.e. judgments whose truth or 

 falsity we learn subsequently to and dependently on experience. 



87. Is THE DISTINCTION OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? 

 We can now see to what extent the distinction, thus understood, 

 between these two great classes of propositions, is objective or 

 subjective, fixed or variable, independent of, or dependent on, the 

 state of the individual s knowledge in presence of any given pro 

 position. 



It does not depend on the subjective state of the individual s 

 knowledge on whether his concepts of the object or reality 

 under examination are poor or rich in their content (31). Every 

 judgment implies that in the mind of the person who makes it 

 there is an analysis of the subject-matter or raw material of the 

 judgment into distinct aspects embodied in distinct notions, 

 and a subsequent comparison and synthesis of these notions 1 (78) ; 

 and, furthermore, that the mind sees a necessary connexion be 

 tween the contents of the notions thus compared. Hence an 

 analysis of the content of either notion must yield the other. In 

 this sense, every judgment would be analytic for a given indivi 

 dual except on the first occasion when he consciously grasped or 

 understood it ; and a judgment might be analytic for one mind 

 and synthetic for another. 2 But there is nothing to be gained 

 by this departure from the more objective interpretation : it makes 

 the distinction exclusively subjective, and essentially variable. 



While not going so far as to make the distinction purely 

 subjective, most modern logicians have introduced a conventional 

 element into it, by making it turn on the connotation of the terms 

 of the proposition : defining an analytic (or verbal or essential 

 or explicative] proposition as one whose predicate gives the 

 whole or part of the connotation of the subject \ and a synthetic (or 

 real or accidental or ampliative] proposition as one whose predicate 

 gives a property or accident of the subject. This departure from 

 the Scholastic account is obviously due to the desire to make the 



1 In this sense every judgment is both analytic and synthetic. Hence it is un 

 fortunate that these terms should have been also used to designate necessary and 

 contingent judgments respectively. It has led to a misunderstanding of the latter 

 distinction. C/. JOSEPH, Logic, p. 187 ; MELLONE, Logic, pp. 367 sqq 



2 This is the manner in which some modern logicians, BRADLEY (Principles of 

 Logic, p. 172) and VEITCH (Institutes of Logic, p. 237), for example, understand the 

 distinction. 



