CATEGORICAL JUDGMENTS AND PROPOSITIONS. 205 



ness, and the judgment that each of them is not any other. Thus 

 affirmation and negation are correlative, reciprocal, complement 

 ary, and inseparable from each other. 



But this process is abstraction (2) rather than negation. We form a de 

 finite concept of any mode of being or reality, by abstracting mentally from 

 every other mode. Nor must we forget that this mental separation of a 

 concept from all that is not itself, does not necessarily involve the incompati 

 bility of the mode of being represented by it, with other modes of being in 

 the real world : if it did, affirmative judgments would be impossible. Our 

 concepts represent each only an abstract, partial, and limited aspect, of the 

 real. Some of these are mutually exclusive : others are not, though they are 

 often found de facto separated in the actual world. Hence, we must not 

 confound the contingent negative judgment with the necessary one : what is 

 not with what cannot be ; or imagine that the ground of every negative 

 judgment, &quot; S is not P,&quot; must be something positive in 5, that is incompatible 

 with P. 1 



The negative judgment must always rest on positive grounds, i.e. on a 

 positive examination of S in relation to P ; but it is important to distinguish 

 between the content of the judgment, i.e. its import or meaning, the infor 

 mation directly conveyed in the proposition that expresses it (82), and the 

 grounds on which it is based. 2 The same judgment may be entertained by 

 different people on different grounds ; and a true judgment may be enter 

 tained on erroneous grounds. Logic deals with the judgment as the expres 

 sion of an objective truth, not with the subjective or mental attitude of this 

 or that individual who holds it ; although, in the individual s mind, the judg 

 ment is inseparable from the grounds on which he bases it. 



1 Thus, Professor WELTON writes: &quot;Negation is due to S possessing an 

 attribute incompatible with the proposed P, and this is implicit in the negative 

 judgment &quot; (Logic, i., p. 162). This is not universally true. The attributes that 

 constitute S must be conceived as different from P. This is needed for all intelli 

 gent predication, whether affirmative or negative. But, for intelligent denial, S need 

 not contain anything incompatible with P. Mr. JOSEPH writes : &quot; The reciprocal 

 exclusiveness of certain attributes and modes of being is the real truth underlying 

 negation &quot; (Logic, p. 162). But, apparently, he means by exclusiveness not neces 

 sarily incompatibility, but either the latter or the actual separation of S and P, in addi 

 tion, of course, to the mental discrimination of the concepts, S and P, from each other. 

 &quot; But for that [exclusiveness],&quot; he continues, &quot; everything would be everything else ; 

 that is, as positive as these several modes of being themselves.&quot; Which means, 

 we take it, that the fact that one mode of being is found to exclude, whether neces 

 sarily or actually, other modes, and to be conceived by us as different from other 

 modes, is as positive a characteristic of each mode of reality (being the limit of the 

 latter) as the content of the mode itself. But, how far are the various modes in 

 which we conceive and judge of reality mutual limitation and discrimination of 

 concepts, affirmation, negation, etc. how far are they modes of being (entia realia) 

 or only modes of thought about being (entia rationis] ? This question would carry 

 us too far into metaphysics. 



2 For example, the relation between S and P may be revealed to us on the word 

 of another, and we may take his word as sufficient. In this case the ground viz. 

 authority is extrinsic to the judgment itself. 



