(a) Judgment is necessary. In saying this, we express all that we said about the objectivity of the world in knowledge. “Objective” meant, we concluded, what we are obliged to think. And judgment is necessary, because it expresses what we are obliged to think; obliged, that is, not as we are obliged to feel pain, as an unexplained and {24} isolated fact, but obliged by a necessity operative within the movement of our consciousness, though not, of course, theoretically recognised as necessity in common thinking. Thus, in the simplest phases of Judgment, necessity does begin to approach the kind of necessity by which we feel pain or are visited by persistent irrational associations. We can trace an explicit sense of necessity in any scientific matter, or in any doubtful and complex matters in which we are aware of our own reflections. We constantly hear and read such phrases as, “I am unable to resist the conclusion”; “I am forced to believe”; “I am driven to think”; “I have no alternative but to suppose.” These are every-day phrases in controversy and in theoretical discussion. And what they all mean is just what was insisted on in the last lecture; the objective or real for us is what we are obliged to think. Given our perceptive state and our mental equipment, the judgment follows. In trivial or simple judgments this necessity is harder to observe within consciousness, and approaches more and more to the mere constraint exercised upon us by physical reality. In a judgment of mere sensuous comparison, such as a “colour-match,” the necessity is not that of an intellectual system, but almost that of a feeling which we cannot dispel. The chief intellectual labour is here negative, and consists in precautions to remove all disturbing influences, both mental and material, so as to let the perception operate freely on the mind. But yet here _is_ necessity; we never for a moment think that we can modify the result; our aim is simply to distinguish from all others the particular strand of necessity by which we desire to be guided.