CATEGORICAL JUDGMENTS AND PROPOSITIONS 239 



or substantive with relative clauses, before converting. Thus 

 &quot;Americans travel much&quot; &quot; Some who travel much are Ameri 

 cans&quot; or &quot; Some great travellers are Americans &quot;. 



Owing to the difficulty of formulating some sorts of judgments 

 in the subject-copula-predicate form, and to the further diffi 

 culty of quantifying their terms when thus formulated, the best re 

 sults we can arrive at by conversion are often awkward, artificial, and 

 cumbersome. But the exercise is an extremely useful one for 

 teaching us how to interpret judgments and propositions ; and, 

 moreover, we can avoid much uncouthness of expression by 

 making use of the right that logic allows us to vary the form of 

 expression as much as we please provided we retain the meaning 

 intact. 



At the same time, it must be remembered that some judgments can be 

 forced into the traditional fourfold scheme only with considerable difficulty, 

 and that even then they absolutely resist conversion. That is to say, their 

 converses are unnatural judgments. This will be obvious if we try to convert 

 such judgments as : &quot; Some men have not the courage to appear as good as 

 they are,&quot; &quot; We cannot all command success,&quot; &quot;It is raining,&quot; &quot;Ireland is 

 an island &quot;. 



The last of these examples is an instance of the singular proposition with 

 a general term for predicate : J such a proposition may of course be converted 

 per accidens, as an A proposition, but the converse, &quot; Some island is Ireland,&quot; 

 is an unmeaning form, for we cannot predicate a singular term, &quot; Ireland,&quot; of 

 a general term, &quot; island &quot;. Properly speaking, we cannot predicate a singular 

 term at all even of another singular term. If there is real predication in 

 such a proposition as &quot;The elder Pitt is Chatham&quot; (or its converse), what 

 we mean to assert is that the individual denoted by the subject-name possesses 

 the attribute of being also designated by the predicate-name : that &quot; The 

 elder Pitt is called or named Chatham &quot;. 



Again, it is only men who are thought of in the other examples as having 

 or not having the courage to appear good, of being able or unable to com 

 mand success ; and it is therefore unmeaning to say that some who possess or 

 do not possess such attributes &quot;are men &quot; : &quot; we do not predicate of an attri 

 bute partially the subject presupposed by it,&quot; as Mr. Joseph 2 observes in refer 

 ence to the converse of &quot; Some men are Christians &quot;. 



These difficulties, in the application of such formal processes as conver 

 sion to our actual judgments, arise from the simple fact that in the latter the 

 matter is really inseparable from the form, and this matter refuses the new 

 forms which these inferential processes would try to force upon it. &quot; It would 



1 Singular propositions with singular predicates convert simply for the good 

 reason that they cannot be converted in any other way ; though for general purposes 

 they are classified as A propositions. &quot; Maynooth College is the largest ecclesiastical 

 college in the world &quot; converts to &quot; The largest ecclesiastical college in the world is 

 Maynooth College &quot;. 



2 op. cit., p. 214. 



