Note 97 — Chapter II

I have borrowed these terms from Sigwart, Logic, § 27; but I cannot be sure that my usage of them corresponds exactly with his. In section 27 he appears to include under empirically universal judgments only such judgments as belong to the first of the three classes distinguished from one another above. At the same time, his description of the unconditionally universal judgment applies to the third class only: such a judgment, he says, expresses a necessary connexion between the predicate P and the subject S ; it means, If anything is S it must also be P. And it seems clear from his subsequent treatment (in § 96) of judgments belonging to the second class that he does not regard them as unconditionally universal.

Lotze (Logic, § 68) indicates the distinction we are discussing by the terms universal and general. But again there seems some uncertainty as to which term he would apply to judgments belonging to our second class. In the universal judgment, he says, we have merely a summation of what is found to be true in every individual instance of the subject; in the general judgment the predication is of the whole of an indefinite class, including both examined and unexamined cases. From this it would appear that the universal judgment corresponds to (1) only, while the general judgment includes both (2) and (3). Lotze, however, continues, “The universal judgment is only a collection of many singular judgments, the sum of whose subjects does as a matter of fact fill up the whole extent of the universal concept; … the universal proposition, All men are mortal, leaves it still an open question whether, strictly speaking, they might not all live for ever, and whether it is not merely a remarkable concatenation of circumstances, different in every different case, which finally results in the fact that no one remains alive. The general judgment, on the other hand, Man is mortal, asserts by its form that it lies in the character of mankind that mortality is inseparable from everyone who partakes in it.” The illustration here given seems to imply that a judgment may be regarded as universal, though it relates to a class of objects, not all of which can be enumerated.