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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”
page 443 Note 1 See, however, § 34, footnote.
page 444 Note 1 Ch. VI, pp. 173 ff.
page 445 Note 1 The existence of such a stage depends on the doubtful distinction of felt difference from ideal distinction. If this is denied such a stage becomes a mere ideal limit.
page 445 Note 2 Cp, note 21 on p. 495 of Logic, Ed. II: “Judgment issues from a felt whole, and this felt whole is never left behind in the sense of remaining outside. It is still there in one with that Reality of and within which the selected synthesis of the judgment is affirmed.”
page 447 Note 1 Logic, Bk. Ill, Pt. I, Ch. VI. There he writes: “Analysis and synthesis have so much in common that they are actually identical.” Here, I think, view (B) begins to emerge, but the somewhat subjective attitude by means of which in §§ 4–6 he maintains a degree of difference between analysis and synthesis as partially separable processes of thought, seems to belong to view (A). At least (B) is more clearly expressed in the terminal essay on inference of Ed. II, where inference is defined as ideal self-development of the object—although if ‘ideal’ here means merely mediate, we have, I suppose, a relic of view (1). But I could not pretend to be able to disentangle these two views in detail.
page 448 Note 1 It is only if we forget this re-emergence of the ‘that,’ and make of it a fixed starting-point and not equally a goal, that thought can be caricatured as sheer mediation. This is intellectualism indeed.
page 448 Note 2 P. 489, Ed. II.
page 449 Note 1 I am tempted to suggest that it is just the conception of thought as sheer mediation which begets the sceptical argument that, because any truth depends on conditions that cannot be verified, it may just as well be false as true: that nothing can be assumed and therefore reason is paralysed. The reaction from Scepticism, on the other hand, often takes the form of divorcing immediate from mediate knowledge, and assuming quite arbitrarily one or more self-evident truths.
page 449 Note 2 Cp. also Logic, Ed. II, p. 656, where Bradley seems to lay rather less emphasis upon the necessary failure of thought as such to achieve individuality than he does in passages such as in Appearance and Reality, pp. 177, 178.
page 450 Note 1 Bradley, on the other hand, seems to present us with a contradiction: (a) For him thought is essentially mediation, and judgment is “thought in its completed form.” Here, though the part seems to usurp the place of the whole, he appears to define judgment as we have suggested that it might be defined, namely, as the moment of mediation in thought. But (b) so far as he distinguishes inference from judgment he speaks of inference as judgment mediated, which suggests that judgment as such is immediate.
page 453 Note 1 Cf. also “Life and the Finite Individual” in Science and Philosophy.
page 453 Note 2 And is clearly foreshadowed in “My Station and Its Duties,” Ch. IV of Ethical Studies, a book more directly influenced by Aristotle and by Hegel than any of Bradley's later work.
page 453 Note 3 Or we might with Hegel entitle such a study a Philosophy of Spirit, and make psychology a section of it.
page 455 Note 1 P. 602.
page 455 Note 2 This is perhaps some answer to the objections urged by Bradley against the dialectical method. Cp. especially Logic, Ed. II, p. 587, last paragraph of § 11.