IS ALL JUDGMENT INVALID ? 87 



disparateness of Thought and FeeHng, involves still 

 further consequences. Not only does it render 

 knowledge impossible, but it renders all reasoning 

 invalid, formally vicious as well as materially false, 

 and in the end leaves it a practice theoretically 

 inexplicable, and practically indefensible. For ac- 

 cording to the most recent researches of logicians,^ 

 all significant judgment involves a reference of the 

 ideal content recognised as such — and it is this 

 which we express in judging — to an unexpressed 

 reality beyond the judgment. The real subject of 

 judgment is the real world ; it states facts as ideas, 

 in terms of thouorht. We talk ideas, but talk 

 about a reality behind them. But if the ideas and 

 the reality are disparate, is not every judgment 

 invalid ? For is not every judgment a deliberate 

 confusion of things essentially different ? If every 

 judgment that is not meaningless involves an ex- 

 plicit reference of thought to reality, in which an 

 ideal content is substituted for a wholly different 

 fact, how is it not fatally unsound ? 



And not only does this reference of thought to 

 reality vitiate all judgment, and so all inference and 

 all knowledge; but it is not even possible to explain 

 how this reference was made. 



If thought and feeling are so different in character, 

 what suggested the attempt to interpret the one by 

 the other ? Why did we not acquiesce in the con- 

 viction that thought was unreal, and that feeling was 

 as indescribable as it is incommunicable ? Why 

 must we needs essay to solder together such dis- 

 cordant elements into a singrle form ? And indeed 

 was this not as gratuitous as it is unavailing ? If 



^ Reference may be made especially to Mr. F. H. Bradley's 

 profound work, " The Principles of Logic," ch. i and 2. 



