The conclusion he reaches is a mere restatement of the difficulty. The
problem he is trying to solve is how the subject _can_ be both in and
out of the judgment, and how the subject without is related to the
subject within. The mere assertion that it is so does not help us to
understand it. His procedure seems like taking advantage of two
meanings of sense-perception, its conscious quality and its brute abrupt
immediacy, and then utilizing this ambiguity to solve a problem which
grows out of the conception of judgment as a reference of idea to
reality.
Turning from his treatment of the world of fact to his discussion of the
world of idea, from the subject to the predicate, as it appears in his
theory of the judgment we find again a paradox which must be recognized
and cannot be obviated. An idea is essentially a meaning. It is not a
particular existence whose essence is uniqueness as is the case with the
subject of the judgment, but is a meaning whose importance is that it
may apply to an indefinite number of unique existences. Its
characteristic is universality. And yet an idea regarded as a psychical
existence, an idea as a content in my mind, is just as particular and
unique as any other existence. How, then, does it obtain its
characteristic of universality? Bosanquet's answer is that it must be
universal by means of a reference to something other than itself. Its
meaning resides, not in its existence as a psychical image, but in its
reference to something beyond itself. Now, any idea that is affirmed is
referred to reality, but do ideas exist which are not being affirmed? If
so, their reference cannot be to reality. Bosanquet discusses the
question in the second section of his introduction as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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