KINDS OF JUDGMENTS AND PROPOSITIONS. 179 



necessary character sprang from the synthesis or union of a purely 

 mental and necessity-producing form of thought in the under 

 standing, with the contingent and ever varying data of sense 

 experience ; a priori, because this necessity-producing groove of 

 thought or &quot; category,&quot; as he called it is an innate mental 

 endowment, existing in the mind prior to, and as a necessary con 

 dition for, all intelligible mental experience. 1 



Those necessary judgments which Kant calls &quot; synthetic a 

 priori&quot; form the very foundation of all scientific knowledge. 

 Such, for example, are the propositions : &quot; Seven and five are 

 twelve,&quot; &quot; The straight line is the shortest distance between two 

 points,&quot; &quot; Whatever begins to be has a cause &quot;. 2 They have un 

 doubtedly this characteristic, that they claim to be necessarily and 

 universally valid : herein lies their scientific value. But the ques 

 tion as to the nature and ultimate grounds of this characteristic, 

 is not so much a logical as a metaphysical question : it can be, 

 satisfactorily discussed only in psychology and criteriology. 



Here it will be sufficient to point out that while positivist philosophers 

 (who endeavour to reduce all human knowledge, with all its characteristics, 

 to sense experience) are logically forced to deny that we have any rational 

 grounds for believing such judgments to be true universally, even beyond 

 the limits of our sense experience ; Kantist philosophers hold them to be both 

 universally and necessarily true or valid, but only within the subjective 

 sphere of the mental forms or categories from which alone their necessary 

 character is derived. That they are true in regard to the nature of extra- 

 mental reality itself, and not merely in regard to reality as revealed to con 

 sciousness in and through those subjective forms of thought, the Kantist will 

 either doubt or deny. The Scholastic philosopher, on the other hand, does 

 not derive the necessary and universal validity of judgments in materia neces- 

 saria from the constitution of the mind exclusively, nor from any supposed 

 subjective forms of thought in the mind, but from the nature or constitution of 

 mind, together with the nature or constitution of Being itself? For him the 

 necessary truth of such judgments is based no less upon the constitution of the 



1 The terms &quot;synthetic&quot; and &quot; a priori ,&quot; as applied to the act of judgment, 

 have, therefore, in Kant s philosophy, not quite the same sense as in Scholastic philo 

 sophy. The Scholastic &quot; synthesis &quot; is a union or comparison of two intellectual 

 notions or concepts ; the Kantian, a union of an innate form of thought with a 

 datum of sense experience. The Kantian &quot; a priori &quot; means prior to all mental ex 

 perience, actual and possible, a prerequisite condition for such experience ; the 

 Scholastic &quot; a priori &quot; means simply that sense experience does not form the ground 

 or motive for our belief in the necessary and universal validity of necessary judg 

 ments, or for that validity itself, but does not exclude nay, rather presupposes 

 the sense experience by which we obtain the data from which to abstract our in 

 tellectual concepts. 



2 C/. KANT, Kritik der reinen Vernunft,, Einl. iv. 



3 C/. what has been said above (15) about the necessity of the laws of thought. 



12 * 



