[29] Bosanquet (_Logic_, I, 30-34) and Jones (_Philosophy of Lotze_,
1895, chap. iv) have called attention to a curious inconsistency in
Lotze's treatment of judgment. On one hand, the statement is as given
above. Judgment grows out of conception in making explicit the
determining relation of universal to its own particular, implied in
conception. But, on the other hand, judgment grows not out of
conception at all, but out of the question of determining connection
in change. Lotze's nominal reason for this latter view is that the
conceptual world is purely static; since the actual world is one of
change, we need to pass upon what really goes together (is causal) in
the change as distinct from such as are merely coincident. But, as
Jones clearly shows, it is also connected with the fact that, while
Lotze nominally asserts that judgment grows out of conception, he
treats conception as the result of judgment since the first view makes
judgment a mere explication of the content of an idea, and hence
merely expository or analytic (in the Kantian sense) and so of more
than doubtful applicability to reality. The affair is too large to
discuss here, and I will content myself with referring to the
oscillation between conflicting contents and gradation of sensory
qualities already discussed (p. 144, note). It is judgment which grows
out of the former, because judgment is the whole situation as such;
conception is referable to the latter because it _is_ one abstraction
within the whole (the solution of possible meanings of the data) just
as the datum is another. In truth, since the sensory datum is not
absolute, but comes in a historical context, the qualities apprehended
as constituting the datum simply define the locus of conflict in the
entire situation. They are attributives of the contents-in-tension of
the colliding things, not calm untroubled ultimates. On pp. 33 and 34
of Vol. I, Lotze recognizes (as we have just seen) that, as matter of
fact, it is both sensory qualities in their systematic grading, or
quantitative determinations (see I, 43, for the recognition of the
necessary place of the quantitative in the true concept), and the
"rich variety of local and temporal combinations," that provoke
thought and supply it with material. But, as usual, he treats this
simply as a historical accident, not as furnishing the key to the
whole matter. In fine, while the heterogeneous collocations and
successions constitute the problematic element that stimulates
thought, quantitative determination of the sensory quality furnishes
one of the two chief means through which thought deals with the
problem. It is a reduction of the original colliding contents to a
form in which the effort at redintegration gets maximum efficiency.
The concept, as ideal meaning, is of course the other partner to the
transaction. It is getting the various possible meanings-of-the-data
into such shape as to make them most useful in construing the data.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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