7. Sigwart denies (31) the distinction between assertorical and apodictic judgments, since in every judgment the sense of necessity in respect of its function is essential. Consequently this assertion likewise hangs together with his erroneous fundamental view of the judgment; he would appear to identify the feeling which he sometimes calls the feeling of evidence with the apodictic character of a judgment. But it would be quite unjustifiable to overlook the modal peculiarity of certain judgments, as for example, the law of contradiction in distinction from other forms of judgment like that of the consciousness that I am. In the first instance, we have to do with what is “necessarily true or false,” in the second instance only with what is “true or false as a matter of fact,” though both are in the same sense evident and do not differ in respect of their certainty. Only in the case of judgments like the former, not, however, from such as the latter do we draw the notions of impossibility and necessity. That Sigwart, in opposing the view which regards the apodictic judgment as a special class, also occasionally bears witness against himself is clear from what has been already said (4). The knowledge that I am, he calls, in opposition to the knowledge of an axiom, the knowledge of a simple actual truth (p. 312). Here he speaks more soundly than his general statements would really allow. Sigwart’s theory of self-evidence is, therefore, essentially false. As in the case of Descartes, so here it cannot be said that Sigwart was not conscious of the phenomenon; indeed, we must rather say in his praise, that with the greatest zeal he has sought to analyze it, but as is the case with many in psychological analysis, it would seem that in the eagerness of analyzing he did not stop at the right point, and has sought to resolve into one another phenomena very distinct in nature. It is obvious that an error respecting the nature of evidence is fraught with the gravest consequence for the logician. It might well be said that we have here touched upon the deep-seated organic disease in Sigwart’s logic, if this may not rather be said to consist in a misunderstanding of the nature of the judgment in general. Again and again its evil results become manifest, as for example, in Sigwart’s inability to understand the most essential causes of our errors, Cf. _Logic_, vol. i. 2nd ed. p. 103, note, where, with strange partiality he assigns the chief blame to the defective development of our language. For the rest, many another celebrated logician in recent times can claim no superiority over Sigwart here. As a further example we need only observe how the doctrine of evidence fares at the hands of the admirable J. S. Mill. Cf. note 69, p. 99.