xiv THE CONCEPT 335 



by the connection between one experience and another. 

 The necessity whereby A follows upon B leads it when 

 it perceives B to prepare for A. But in the stage of con- 

 crete experience, this, we may believe, is an influence which 

 operates without being formed into an object of conscious- 

 ness. In the stage now under consideration, this influence, 

 always operative, becomes a sufficiently clear content of 

 consciousness to be expressed by a word. Thus in the 

 recognition of necessary connection by the Universal Judg- 

 ment, we have once more a mental achievement which 

 consists in forming into a distinct content of conscious- 

 ness an element which at an earlier stage is operative 

 without apparently being understood by the mind on 

 which it operates. 



9. A no less important aspect of the Universal Judg- 

 ment is its reference to an indefinite number of cases, or, 

 if we prefer so to put it, to reality and experience as a 

 whole. This aspect of the universal has indeed been 

 something of a stumbling block to logicians from Aristotle 

 downwards. There is something of a paradox in a form 

 of thought taken to refer to a number of cases of which 

 no one is specified, and the vast majority may be utterly 

 unknown. A sense of the paradox has led many writers 

 to refuse any meaning to the universal as " taken in exten- 

 sion." 1 They have failed to allow for a certain unavoidable 

 artificiality in the distinctions of Logic which seeks to 

 appraise functions of thought that cannot wholly be 

 understood in isolation from other functions to which 

 they are related. The universal judgment is not so much 

 a reference to an indefinite number of particulars as a rule 

 of reference. As a thought-function, it needs, in this re- 

 spect, completion by the "minor premiss," or again, it 

 forms the keystone of the arch in Judgments of Com- 

 parison and Classification. But however incomplete in 

 isolation, its function in thought is (a) to sum up the 

 result of a mass of experience in the shape of that which 

 pervades the whole whether as a continuous identity or as 



1 This is the point common to Aristotle, Post Anal, I. i, and Mill, 

 Logic, II. ch. 3. It led Mr. Bradley (Logic, p. 228) and Hegel (Wiss. 

 der Log. Part II. Werke, Bd. V. p. 146) to find a contradiction in the 

 Syllogism " taken in extension." 



