178 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



propositions in materia necessaria i.e. propositions formulating 

 relations which cannot be conceived to be otherwise than they are, 

 between the objects of our thought are those described as verbal 

 or explicative by some modern writers, or that judgments in 

 materia necessaria never give us new and real information. These 

 latter have been called a priori judgments in the sense explained 

 above. 1 Leibniz neither very happily nor very correctly described 

 these &quot;necessary&quot; judgments as &quot;analytic,&quot; on the assumption 

 that their predicates could be always derived from an analysis of 

 the essence of their subjects, independently of experience ; while he 

 called &quot;contingent&quot; judgments &quot; synthetic,&quot; &quot;empiric,&quot; &quot; a pos 

 teriori&quot; i.e. posterior to, and dependent on, experience. Apart from 

 the fact that every judgment involves synthesis (of notions) as well 

 as analysis (78), it is not true that all judgments in materia neces 

 saria are reached by finding the predicate in an analysis of the 

 essence of the subject Kant, who adopted the classification of 

 Leibniz, was not slow to see that only a comparatively small 

 number of such judgments are obtained by an analysis of the 

 subject- term. These merely verbal or explicative judgments, which 

 give us no new information, he described as &quot;analytic a priori&quot; 

 udgments. Another scientifically unimportant class of judg 

 ments in materia contingenti, which, being based merely on ex 

 perience, have not the characteristics of necessary and universal 

 validity, he called &quot;synthetic a posteriori&quot; judgments. There 

 still remained, then, an important and extensive class of judgments 

 in materia necessaria judgments both necessary in character and 

 productive of real knowledge which Kant refused to call &quot; anal 

 ytic &quot; because they did not verify the narrower definition of that 

 title, and which he refused to call &quot;# posteriori&quot; because their 

 necessary and universal validity which gave them their scientific 

 value and significance could never, he believed, have been the out 

 come of experience, but must have been conferred upon them by the 

 mind itself prior to, and independently of, all experience. These 

 he called &quot; synthetic a priori&quot; judgments : synthetic, because their 



1 The terms &amp;gt;&quot;a priori&quot; and &quot;a posteriori&quot; refer primarily to our reasoning 

 processes ; the former denoting those which descend from cause to effect, from what 

 is naturally prior to what is naturally posterior, the latter those which lead us from 

 a knowledge of effects to a knowledge of their causes. True science in the Aristotelean 

 sense of the word (251) is deductive, a priori, descends from causes and reasons as 

 antecedents to effects and theorems as consequents ; but, very often, before we reach 

 a knowledge of these causes which become the explaining principles and reasons 

 of our science, a long work of analysis is needed, to decompose the complex data of 

 experience into its simplest elements. 



