The question is only one of words; but it appears to me more convenient to reserve the term Existential judgments for those highly artificial assertions which actually employ the Predicate “exist” or “existence,” _e.g._ “Matter exists.” These are at the opposite end of the scale from those last-mentioned, and are the nearest approach to Judgment with Subject and no Predicate. That is to say, their Predicate is the generalised abstract form of predication [1] without any special content--the kind and degree of existence asserted being understood from the context.
[1] Expressed in Greek by the word corresponding to “is,” used with an accent, which does not belong to it in its ordinary use. He is good = ἄγαθός ἐστι [= agathos esti]; He exists = ἔστι [= esti Tr.].
Except, however, in the case of these peculiarly abstract and reflective assertions, it must be laid down that a predicated content is necessary to judgment, while an _explicit_ subject of predication is unnecessary.
4. If it is possible, in some cases, to throw the whole content of judgment into the predicate, this rather disposes us to criticise the notion that there must be two distinct matters, objects, ideas, or contents, in every judgment. The notion in question has two forms.
It is thought that the Judgment consists in putting two _ideas_ together, [1] or, { 102} That the Judgment consists in comparing two or more things. [2]
[1] For this conception, see Hamilton’s _Lectures on Logic_, i. 227, and for a criticism on it. Mill’s _Logic_, Bk. I. ch. v., _init_, Dr. Venn seems to incline to Hamilton’s view, but I do not feel sure that he intends to discuss the question in the form in which it is referred to in the text. See his _Empirical Logic_, pp. 210 and 211.
[2] See Jevons, pp. 61-2; and Mill, Bk. I. ch. iii., _init_.; and ch. iv., _init_.
(_a_) The notion of “two ideas” has two principal difficulties.
_Notion of mental transition pure and simple_
(i.) In its simplest shape the notion of “two ideas” involves the great blunder which I explained in Lecture IV. It suggests that the parts of Judgment are separate and successive psychical states, and that the Judgment consists in a change from the one to the other. Herbert Spencer, as I understand him, considers every relation to be apprehended as a mental change or passage from one idea to another. This view would degrade logical connection into mere psychical transition. I do not say that there is no psychical transition in Judgment. I do say that psychical transition is not enough to make a Judgment. The parts of Judgment, as we saw in the last lecture, do not succeed one another separately like the parts of a sentence. The relation between Subject and Predicate is not a relation between mental states, but is itself the content of a single though continuous mental state. Mill has rightly touched on this point. “When I say that fire causes heat, do I mean that my idea of fire causes my idea of heat?” [1] and so on. The fact is that “Fire-causing-heat” is itself the single content or meaning represented in my symbolic idea; it is not a succession of psychical states in my mind, or a passage from the idea of fire to the idea of causing heat.