206 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. 



Further than this, there is an undeniable natural tendency to give ex 

 pression to the grounds, in or with the expression of the judgment itself. In 

 the negative judgment, therefore, whose function is to deny or contradict a 

 suggested affirmative, we rarely, if ever, rest content with the mere contra 

 dictory , the bare denial itself : we tend to go beyond this and to assert, if we 

 can, in opposition to the suggested affirmative, something positively incom 

 patible with, or contrary to, that affirmative (40, 41). Some authors contend 

 that this is always necessary : that the bare denial in itself, apart from its 

 grounds, has no significance, conveys no information. 1 This is going too 

 far : for the concepts compared in a bare denial are each intelligible, and 

 their mutual exclusion by a bare denial does convey information. The bare 

 denial &quot; 5 is not /&amp;gt;,&quot; carries on the face of it the information that 5 has been 

 examined in relation to P, and has been found without P. Nothing else 

 need necessarily be known about S, as a result of examining it, than the ab 

 sence of P from it, and in such a case this absence of P is what has been 

 positively discovered in S, and what is accepted as a ground for the denial 

 &quot; 5 is not P &quot;. It is not necessary for an intelligible denial of the proposition 

 &quot; S is P,&quot; that we discover in 5 some positive attribute exclusive of P. The 

 &quot; something in S which excludes P,&quot; the &quot;Af&quot; referred to above, maybe 

 simply the absence of P, the negative attribute &quot; not-P &quot; ; and, in such a 

 case, even the assertion of the ground for the negative judgment &quot; 5 is not 

 P,&quot; would not yield an antecedent affirmative judgment. Dr. Keynes, 2 

 following Sigwart, 3 expresses all this both briefly and clearly by saying that 

 &quot; the ground of a denial may be either (a) a deficiency or () an opposition &quot; ; 

 and he adds this apt illustration : &quot; I may deny that a man travelled by a 

 certain train either (a) because I searched the train through just before it 

 started and found he was not there, or (b) because I knew he was elsewhere 

 when the train started I may, for instance, have seen him leave the station 

 at the same moment in another train in an opposite direction.&quot; 



It is not true, therefore, that we always reach mere contradictory or deny 

 ing judgments through the affirmative predication of attributes contrary to, or 

 incompatible with, the subject in question. 



WELTON, Logic, i., pp. 161-80. JOSEPH, Logic, chap, ix., pp. 161-3. 

 KEYNES, Formal Logic, pp. 91-107, 119 sqq. 



1 Cf. BOSANQUET, Logic, pp. 305, 383 ; apud KEYNES, Formal Logtc, p. 122 ; 

 WELTON, Logic, i., p. 162 : &quot; Pure negation has no existence in fact and cannot be 

 really thought.&quot; 



2 op. cit., p. 121. 3 Logic, i., p. 313. 



