Deductive Logic | Page 5

brittle.'
§ 36. Corresponding to these three processes there are three products of thought, viz.
(1) The Concept.
(2) The Judgement.
(3) The Inference.
§ 37. Since our language has a tendency to confuse the distinction between processes and products, [Footnote: E.g. We have to speak quite indiscriminately of Sensation, Imagination, Reflexion, Sight, Thought, Division, Definition, and so on, whether we mean in any case a process or a product.] it is the more necessary to keep them distinct in thought. Strictly we ought to speak of conceiving, judging and inferring on the one hand, and, on the other, of the concept, the judgement and the inference.
The direct object of logic is the study of the products rather than of the processes of thought. But, at the same time, in studying the products we are studying the processes in the only way in which it is possible to do so. For the human mind cannot be both actor and spectator at once; we must wait until a thought is formed in our minds before we can examine it. Thought must be already dead in order to be dissected: there is no vivisection of consciousness. Thus we can never know more of the processes of thought than what is revealed to us in their products.
§ 38. When the three products of thought are expressed in language, they are called respectively
(1) The Term.
(2) The Proposition.
(3) The Inference.
§ 39. Such is the ambiguity of language that we have already used the term 'inference' in three different senses--first, for the act or process of inferring; secondly, for the result of that act as it exists in the mind; and, thirdly, for the same thing as expressed in language. Later on we shall have to notice a further ambiguity in its use.
§ 40. It has been declared that thought in general is the faculty of comparison, and we have now seen that there are three products of thought. It follows that each of these products of thought must be the result of a comparison of some kind or other.
The concept is the result of comparing attributes. The judgement is the result of comparing concepts. The inference is the result of comparing judgements.
§ 41. In what follows we shall, for convenience, adopt the phraseology which regards the products of thought as clothed in language in preference to that which regards the same products as they exist in the mind of the individual. For although the object of logic is to examine thought pure and simple, it is obviously impossible to discuss it except as clothed in language. Accordingly the three statements above made may be expressed as follows--
The term is the result of comparing attributes. The proposition is the result of comparing terms. The inference is the result of comparing propositions.
§ 42. There is an advantage attending the change of language in the fact that the word 'concept' is not an adequate expression for the first of the three products of thought, whereas the word 'term' is. By a concept is meant a general notion, or the idea of a class, which corresponds only to a common term. Now not only are common terms the results of comparison, but singular terms, or the names of individuals, are so too.
§ 43. The earliest result of thought is the recognition of an individual object as such, that is to say as distinguished and marked off from the mass of its surroundings. No doubt the first impression produced Upon the nascent intelligence of an infant is that of a confused whole. It requires much exercise of thought to distinguish this whole into its parts. The completeness of the recognition of an individual object is announced by attaching a name to it. Hence even an individual name, or singular term, implies thought or comparison. Before the child can attach a meaning to the word 'mother,' which to it is a singular term, it must have distinguished between the set of impressions produced in it by one object from those which are produced in it by others. Thus, when Vergil says
Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,
he is exhorting the beatific infant to the exercise of the faculty of comparison.
§ 44. That a common term implies comparison does not need to be insisted upon. It is because things resemble each other in certain of their attributes that we call them by a common name, and this resemblance could not be ascertained except by comparison, at some time and by some one. Thus a common term, or concept, is the compressed result of an indefinite number of comparisons, which lie wrapped up in it like so many fossils, witnessing to prior ages of thought.
§ 45. In the next product of thought, namely, the proposition, we have the result of a single act of comparison between two terms; and