4. _The Judgment and the Proposition._--Judgment in general is the mental act of believing that something is (or is not) determined. A proposition is the consequent verbal expression of such a belief, and consists in asserting that the thing as signified by the subject is (or is not) determined as signified by the predicate. But the expression is not necessary. Sensation irresistibly produces a judgment of existence without needing language. Children think long before they speak; and indeed, as mere vocal sounds are not speech, and as the apprehension that a word signifies a thing is a judgment, judgment is originally not an effect, but a cause of significant language. At any rate, even when we have learnt to speak, we do not express all we think, as we may see not only from the fewness of words known to a child, but also from our own adult consciousness. The principle of thought is to judge enough to conclude. The principle of language is to speak only so far as to understand and be understood. Hence speech is only a curtailed expression of thought. Sometimes we express a whole judgment by one word, e.g. "Fire!" or by a phrase, e.g. "What a fire!" and only usually by a proposition. But even the normal proposition in the syllogistic form _tertii adjacentis_, with subject, predicate and copula, is seldom a complete expression of the judgment. The consequence is that the proposition, being different from a judgment arising after a judgment, and remaining an imperfect copy of judgment, is only a superficial evidence of its real nature. Fortunately, we have more profound evidences, and at least three evidences in all: the linguistic expression of belief in the proposition; the consciousness of what we mentally believe; and the analysis of reasoning, which shows what we must believe, and have believed, as data for inference. In these ways we find that a judgment is both different from, and more than, a proposition. But recent logicians, although they perceive the difference, nevertheless tend to make the proposition the measure of the judgment. This makes them omit sensory judgments, and count only those which require ideas, and even general ideas expressed in general terms. Sigwart, for example, gives as instances of our most elementary judgments, "This is Socrates," "This is snow"--beliefs in things existing beyond ourselves which require considerable inferences from many previous judgments of sense and memory. Worse still, logicians seem unable to keep the judgment apart from the proposition. Herbart says that the judgment "A is B" does not contain the usually added thought that A is, because there is no statement of A's existence; as if the statement mattered to the thought. So Sigwart, in order to reduce universals to hypotheticals, while admitting that existence is usually thought, argues that it is not stated in the universal judgment; so also Bosanquet. But in the judgment the point is not what we state, but what