expressed by a proposition, the proposition expresses the results of
the division by two terms, subject and predicate, and by the copula
that what is signified by the subject is what is signified by the
predicate; and the proposition is a combination of the two terms; e.g.
border war is evil. (6) A complex judgment is a combination of two
judgments, and may be copulative, e.g. you and I are men, or
hypothetical, or disjunctive, &c.
Empirical logic, the logic of Aristotle and Bacon, is on the right way.
It is the business of the logician to find the causes of the judgments
which form the premises and the conclusions of inference, reasoning and
science. What knowledge do we get by sense, memory and experience, the
first mental causes of judgment? What is judgment, and what its various
kinds? What is inference, how does it proceed by combining judgments as
premises to cause judgments as conclusions, and what are its various
kinds? How does inference draw conclusions more or less probable up to
moral certainty? How does it by the aid of identification convert
probable into necessary conclusions, which become necessary principles
of demonstration? How is categorical succeeded by conditional inference?
What is scientific method as a system of inferences about definite
subjects? How does inference become the source of error and fallacy? How
does the whole process from sense to inference discover the real truth
of judgments, which are true so far as they signify things known by
sense, memory, experience and inference? These are the fundamental
questions of the science of inference. Conceptual logic, on the other
hand, is false from the start. It is not the first business of logic to
direct us how to form conceptions signified by terms, because sense is a
prior cause of judgment and inference. It is not the second business of
logic to direct us how out of conceptions to form judgments signified by
propositions, because the real causes of judgments are sense, memory,
experience and inference. It is, however, the main business of logic to
direct us how out of judgments to form inferences signified by
discourse; and this is the one point which conceptual logic has
contributed to the science of inference. But why spoil the further
mental analysis of inference by supposing that conceptions are
constituents of judgment and therefore of inference, which thus becomes
merely a complex combination of conceptions, an extension of ideas? The
mistake has been to convert three operations of mind into three
processes in a fixed order--conception, judgment, inference. Conception
and judgment are decisions: inference alone is a process, from decisions
to decision, from judgments to judgment. Sense, not conception, is the
origin of judgment. Inference is the process which from judgments about
sensible things proceeds to judgments about things similar to sensible
things. Though some conceptions are its conditions and some judgments
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