Judging is the process of conjoining and disjoining notions. When these notions are conjoined the judgment is affirmative; when disjoined the judgment is negative. To illustrate: “Some men are wise,” is an affirmative judgment, while “Some men are not wise,” is a negative judgment. All judgments are either affirmative or negative and this suggests that there may be but two fundamental laws or axioms underlying judging or all forms of developed thinking. One law would condition the affirmative judgment; the other the negative. Such is actually the case. The law which permits the affirmative judgment is called the _law of identity_, while the law which allows a negative judgment is known as the _law of contradiction_. There is a third law termed the _law of excluded middle_, which is in reality a combination of the other two. =2. THE LAW OF IDENTITY.= In general the law of identity implies a certain permanency throughout the material world. That door is a door and always will be a door till the conditions change. If it were not for this law, that everything is permanently identical with itself, it would be impossible to think at all. For example: Take away the notion of permanency from the door and thought becomes at once ridiculous. Suppose that while we are asserting that the object is a door, it changes to a tree, and while we insist that the object is now a tree, it changes to a cow, etc. We can readily see that it would hardly be worth while to think at all. The law of identity may be stated in three ways: (1) Whatever is, is; (2) Everything remains identical with itself; (3) The same is the same. ABSOLUTE IDENTITY――COMPLETE AND INCOMPLETE. Applying the law of identity to the affirmative judgment expressed in the form of a proposition, we find two kinds of identity, absolute and relative. In the propositions, “Socrates is Socrates,” “dogs are dogs,” “honesty is honesty,” the subject is _absolutely_ identical with the predicate――the same in form and meaning. If we were to illustrate the subject and predicate by two circles they would be of the same size and shape, the one coinciding with the other point to point.