The first point at which we take issue with this treatment of time in
relation to judgment is in the distinction between the process of
arriving at the judgment and the completed judgment. Bosanquet himself
defines judgment as an intellectual act by which an ideal content is
referred to reality. Now, at what point does this act begin? Certainly
at the point where an ideal content is first applying to reality, and
this, as he points out, is at the beginning of the process which he
describes as the process of arriving at a judgment. It is nothing to the
point that at this stage the predicate is tentative, while later it
becomes defined. His process of arriving at the judgment is exactly the
process we have been describing as the early stages of any and every
judgment. When he talks about the judgment as completed, he has
apparently shifted from the dynamic view of judgment implied in his
definition to a static view. All he could mean by a completed
judgment--in distinction to the total activity of arriving at a
judgment--is the new content of which we find ourselves possessed when
the total process of predication is complete. But this content is not a
judgment at all. It is a new construction of reality which may serve
either as subject or as predicate in future judgments.
Now, if we regard the judgment as the total activity by which an ideal
content is referred to reality, then must we not regard time as an
essential element? Bosanquet answers this question in the negative,
because he believes that if time is an essential element, then the parts
of the judgment must necessarily fall outside one another in time. But
is this necessary? If the essence of judgment is the very modification,
_pari passu_, of subject and predicate, then time must be an essential
element in it, but it is not at all necessary that its elements should
fall outside of one another in time. In other words, the dilemma which
Bosanquet points out on p. 87 is not a genuine one. There is no
difficulty involved in admitting that the judgment is a transition in
time, and still holding that its _parts_ do not fall outside _one
another_ in time. His own solution of the problem--_i. e._, that,
although judgment is an intellectual process in time, still time is not
an essential feature of it, because subject and predicate are coexistent
and judgment is a relation between them--involves a desertion of his
dynamic view of judgment. He defines judgment, not as a relation between
subject and predicate, but as an intellectual _act_.[53]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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