CONDITIONAL JUDGMENTS AND PROPOSITIONS 267 



cation (82), and will therefore sometimes entail considerable modification of 

 the original prepositional terms. The examples given might be expressed 

 thus : If a just God exists, He will punish the wicked ; if the virtues in 

 clude patience, some of them are painful ; if vice is a habit, like virtue, it is 

 voluntary ; if the earth is immovable, it has the sun moving around it ; if 

 the Patagonians are savages, they are cruel. 



It is this form, If S is M it is P, that reveals most clearly the relation 

 between the &quot; if&quot; judgment and the categorical judgment. The former brings 

 out explicitly some condition on which the predication made in the latter is 

 grounded. In virtue of the Principle of Sufficient Reason ( 1 6), we must have 

 a &quot; sufficient reason &quot; for formulating the judgment S is P. This reason is 

 something which we see in 5, or connected with S, when we compare the 

 latter with P (97, 98). This something, which furnishes us with the ground 

 for predicating P of 5, let us call M. Now, we may make this ground ex 

 plicit by stating our judgment : S, because it is M, is P; or, 5 which is M is P. 

 And if we abstract from every concrete S of our experience, and fix our atten 

 tion on the abstract relation between M and P which is the ground of our 

 original judgment the form of statement which will best bring out this rela 

 tion is the &quot; if&quot; proposition, &quot; If S is M it is P &quot;. Thus, while the categorical 

 form emphasizes rather the concrete reality of the terms compared, the &quot; if&quot; 

 form emphasizes the abstract relation between them. 1 



There is, consequently, no really sharp line of demarcation between the 

 categorical judgment and the &quot; if&quot; judgment, nor between the two classes we 

 have distinguished in the latter. But these two classes do differ sufficiently to 

 justify us in dealing with each separately. They might be distinguished sym 

 bolically by writing the conditional in some such form as : &quot; If any S is M it 

 is P&quot;; z and the hypothetical: &quot; If A is true C is true,&quot; or simply &quot; If A 

 then C&quot;. 



134. &quot;DOUBT&quot; AND &quot;INFERENCE&quot; IN THE &quot;IF&quot; JUDG 

 MENT. The force of the conjunction &quot; If&quot; seems to be to express 

 a combination of doubt and inference. It expresses that condition 

 of things &quot; in which we know that two elements, events, objects, 

 or what not, are connected together, but are uncertain about the 

 first member of such connexion. It is as if we knew that there 

 were two links of a chain which held together, but were not 

 quite secure in our grasp of the nearest of them.&quot; 3 Indeed 

 this combination of doubt and knowledge is necessary for all 

 inference : were all things doubtful inference would be impossible ; 

 were all things certain it would be superfluous. Of these two 



1 C/. WELTON, Logic, pp. 183-86. 



2 Compare the above with the proposition &quot; If this S is M it is P,&quot; which, though 

 derivable from the former, a conditional, is itself put down by Dr. Keynes (op. cit., p. 

 252, footnote) as a hypothetical , thus forming &quot; a kind of junction between &quot; the two 

 forms. While the former may be easily expressed by the categorical &quot; All S s that 

 are M are P,&quot; can the latter be identified with the categorical &quot; This S which is M is 

 P &quot; ? Cf. infra, 135, 144. 



3 VENN, Empirical Logic, p. 249. 



