Note 93 — Chapter IX

Several writers of repute have habitually used the word “Judgment” in a most unwarrantable manner—Lewes, for instance, making it stand indifferently for an act of sensuous determination and an act of conceptual thought. I may, therefore, here remark that in the following analysis I shall not be concerned with any such gratuitous abuses of the term, but will understand it in the technical sense which it bears in logic and psychology. The extraordinary views which Mr. Huxley has published upon this subject I can only take to be ironical. For instance, he says:—“Ratiocination is resolvable into predication, and predication consists in marking in some way the existence, the co-existence, the succession, the likeness and unlikeness, of things or their ideas. Whatever does this, reasons; and I see no more ground for denying to it reasoning power, because it is unconscious, than I see for refusing Mr. Babbage’s engine the title of a calculating machine on the same grounds” (Critiques and Addresses, p. 281). If this statement were taken seriously, of course the answer would be that Mr. Babbage’s engine is called a calculating machine only in a metaphorical sense, seeing that it does not evolve its results by any process at all resembling, or in any way analogous to, those of a human mind. It would be an absurd misstatement to say that a machine either reasons or predicates, only because it “marks in some way the existence, the co-existence, the succession, and the likeness and unlikeness of things.” A rising barometer or a striking clock do not predicate, any more than a piece of wood, shrieking beneath a circular saw, feels. To denominate purely mechanical or unconscious action—even though it should take place in a living agent and be perfectly adjustive—reason or predication, would be to confuse physical phenomena with psychical; and, as I have shown in my previous work, even if it be supposed that the latter are mere “indices” or “shadows” of the former, still the fact of their existence must be recognized; and the processes in question have reference to them, not to their physical counterparts. It is, therefore, just as incorrect to say that a calculating machine really calculates, or predicates the result of its calculations, as it would be to say that a musical-box composes a tune because it plays a tune, or that the love of Romeo and Juliet was an isosceles triangle, because their feelings of affection, each to each, were, like the angles at the base of that figure, equal. But, as I have said, I take it that Professor Huxley must here have been writing in some ironical sense, and therefore purposely threw his criticisms into a preposterous form.