Any assertion which is incredible because the identical quality is wanting will illustrate the required structure. There is a story commented on by Thackeray in one of his occasional papers, which implied that the Duke of Wellington took home note-paper from a club to which he did not {72} belong. (Thackeray gives the true explanation of the fact on which the suggestion was founded.) The identity concerned in this case would be that of character. Can we find an identity between the character involved in a piece of meanness like that suggested and the character of the Duke of Wellington? No; and _prima facie_ therefore the judgment is false. The identity which should bind it together breaks it in two. But yet, again: supposing the external evidence to be strong enough, we may have to accept a fact which conflicts with a man’s character as we conceive it. That is so: in such a case one kind of identity appears to contradict the other. I may think that I saw a man with my own eyes, doing something which wholly contradicts his character as I judge it. Then there is a conflict between identity in personal appearance and identity in character, and we have to criticise the two estimates of identity--_i.e._ to refer them both to our general system of knowledge, and to accept the connection which can be best adapted to that system. We have got, then, as the active elements in Judgment a Subject in Reality, the meaning of an idea, and an identity between them. Is this enough? Have we the peculiar act of affirmation wherever we have these conditions? This is not the question by what elements of language the judgment is rendered. We shall speak of that in the next lecture. The question is now, simply, “Is a significant idea, referred to reality, always an assertion?” The first answer seems to be that such an idea is always _in_ an assertion, but need not constitute the whole of an {73} assertion. If we think of a subject in judgment which is represented by a relative sentence, it seems clear that any idea which can stand a predicate can also form a part of a subject. “The exhibition which it is proposed to hold at Chicago in 1893”--has in effect just the same elements of meaning, and just the same reference to a point in our world of reality as if the sentence ran, “It is proposed to hold an exhibition at Chicago in 1893.” In common parlance we should say, that in the former case we entertain an idea--or conceive or represent it--while in the latter case we affirm it. But if we go on to say that the former kind of sentence as truly represents the nature of thought as the latter, then it seems that we are mistaken. Even language does not admit such a clause to the rank of an independent sentence.