The Essentials of Logic, Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and InferenceBosanquet, Bernard
Philosophy
The Essentials of Logic, Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and Inference
Bosanquet, Bernard
Logic
According to these ideas, the objective is, shortly stated, whatever
we are obliged to think. This, though it is _in_ our thought, is not
considered merely _as_ our thought, or as a train of images or whole
of presentation in our minds. That is an artificial point of view, the
point of view of psychology, and we must carefully avoid starting from
it. But knowledge refers beyond its mental self, and has no limitation
in time or in kind except its own necessity. Thus, I am forced to
think, by a certain context of ideas and perceptions, that there is
now a fire burning in my study at home. This judgment is not barred
by the fact that my mind, as a {12} function attached to my body, is
here three miles away. The thought is objective for me, so long as I am
obliged to think it. My presence in or absence from the room where the
fire is burning has no effect on the question, except as it furnishes
me with evidence one way or the other. Not only absence in space is no
obstacle, but succession in time is no obstacle. My thought, which _is_
here and now, refers confidently to what has happened in long intervals
of time, if the necessity of consistency obliges it to do so. Thus if
I go back to my room and find the fire out and the room very cold, I
infer without hesitation to certain acts and events which are needed
to explain this state of things. And interpretations or explanations
of this kind make up my world, which is for me in my thought, but is
presented as more than my thought, and cannot be a world at all unless
it is more than in my thought. It is in as far as my thought constructs
and presents a world which is more than my momentary psychical state,
that my thought, and the world as presented to me in it, is objective.
The world is not a set of my ideas, but it is a set of objects and
relations of which I frame an idea, and the existence of which has no
meaning for me except as presented in the idea which 1 frame. We are
not to think of (i) Ideas, and (ii) Things which they represent; the
ideas, taken as parts of a world, _are_ the things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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