Judgment Leads to General Truths.—But judgment goes much farther than to
assist in building percepts and concepts. It takes our concepts after they are
formed and discovers and affirms relations between them, thus enabling us
finally to relate classes as well as individuals. It carries our thinking over into the
realm of the universal, where we are not hampered by particulars. Let us see how
this is done. Suppose we have the concept man and the concept animal, and that
we think of these two concepts in their relation to each other. The mind analyzes
each into its elements, compares them, and finds the essential identity of
meaning in a sufficient number to warrant the judgment, man is an animal. This
judgment has given a new bit of knowledge, in that it has discovered to us a new
relation between two great classes, and hence given both, in so far, a new
meaning and a wider definition. And as this new relation does not pertain to any
particular man or any particular animal, but includes all individuals in each class,
it has carried us over into universals, so that we have a general truth and will not
have to test each individual man henceforth to see whether he fits into this
relation.
Judgments also, as we will see later, constitute the material for our reasoning.
Hence upon their validity will depend the validity of our reasoning.
The Validity of Judgments.—Now, since every judgment is made up of an
affirmation of relation existing between two terms, it is evident that the validity
of the judgment will depend on the thoroughness of our knowledge of the terms
compared. If we know but few of the attributes of either term of the judgment,
the judgment is clearly unsafe. Imperfect concepts lie at the basis of many of our
wrong judgments. A young man complained because his friend had been
expelled from college for alleged misbehavior. He said, "Mr. A—— was the best
boy in the institution." It is very evident that someone had made a mistake in
judgment. Surely no college would want to expel the best boy in the institution.
Either my complainant or the authorities of the college had failed to understand
one of the terms in the judgment. Either "Mr. A——" or "the best boy in the
institution" had been wrongly interpreted by someone. Likewise, one person will
say, "Jones is a good man," while another will say, "Jones is a rascal." Such a
discrepancy in judgment must come from a lack of acquaintance with Jones or a
lack of knowledge of what constitutes a good man or a rascal.
No doubt most of us are prone to make judgments with too little knowledge of
the terms we are comparing, and it is usually those who have the least reason for
confidence in their judgments who are the most certain that they cannot be
mistaken. The remedy for faulty judgments is, of course, in making ourselves