288 THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 



alternatives a wider genus including them ; and in all cases it 

 has some categorical judgment underlying it, exactly as in the 

 case of the &quot; If&quot; judgment (132). In all cases, too, it is an expres 

 sion of limited knowledge, of knowledge combined with ignorance 

 or doubt : a limited knowledge of some genus or universe of re 

 ference, and ignorance about the species or sub-classes in that 

 sphere. 1 But the categorical which we may substitute for it is 

 subject to precisely the same limitations. 



Some writers have claimed that the disjunctive &quot; goes beyond &quot; the hypo 

 thetical, and this in turn beyond the categorical judgment, not merely in the 

 sense explained by Mr. Joseph, but in the sense that the disjunctive judgment 

 is the ideal or most perfect attainable form of human thought and the cate 

 gorical presumably the least perfect. This, however, is a view which seems 

 to have been advocated without sufficient grounds. 



Professor Welton, following Bosanquet, holds that the disjunctive con 

 tains some positive or categorical element not contained in the hypothetical. 

 &quot;Were we confined to the latter,&quot; he writes, 2 &quot; thought would be condemned 

 to an endless regress. For though If S is M it is P, gives us in Afthe ground 

 of P, yet we must go on to similarly ask for the ground of M. This regress 

 can only be avoided by assuming that the judgment refers to a more or less 

 self-contained system. It is such a system that the disjunctive judgment in its 

 ideal form makes explicit in its enumeration of the sub-species under the sub 

 ject genus. It is in the exhaustive character of this enumeration that the 

 sufficiency of the hypothetical as a statement of a condition is found. Hence 

 we find in the disjunctive the mode of expressing that systematic connexion 

 which is the only form in which ive can think reality&quot; 



1 When our knowledge about the real state of things is indefinite, i.e. mixed 

 with doubt or ignorance, this indefiniteness cannot of course belong to the facts them 

 selves, but only to the state of our knowledge in whatever form of judgment we 

 express the latter : categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive. The facts themselves are 

 definite, determinate. And just as the study of each of the former kinds of judgment 

 leads to metaphysical problems about our mode of conceiving the real (cf. 98, 132), so 

 does the study ot the disjunctive judgment (cf. JOSEPH, op. cit., p. 168). The problem 

 here would be : Is the disjunctive in the facts, or is it merely between our partial and 

 limited mental views of the facts ? And the correct answer would seem to be that it 

 is always only in our knowledge, or in possible, ideal reality, in reality only as deter- 

 minable, and never in actual facts. According to Mr. Joseph, such a proposition as 

 &quot; Number is either odd or even &quot; &quot; seems to express a disjunction in the facts ; and 

 the species of the same genus are a kind of real disjunction &quot; (ibid.). But species 

 and genus as such belong to the ideal or conceptual order only, and there alone is 

 disjunction admissible. Whatever exists must be a determinate individual, itself and 

 no other, as Mr. Joseph himself immediately asserts : &quot; If a colour is to exist, it must 

 be blue or red or some other colour, and if it is one it can be none of the others. 

 We come back here upon the same truth which met us in considering negative 

 judgments, that a thing is definitely this or that by not being something else; we 

 have to recognize also that there is often a limited number of possibilities, in the 

 way, for example, of colour, or of animal species, but why or how there should be a 

 limit to what is possible in the universe is a hard question &quot; (ibid.). 



a op. cit., p. 191, italics ours. 



