Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/195

HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION. 179 It may be objected that, although the additional Universal is not sufficient to constitute an Individual capable of having a Universal, yet that we should reach a sufficient degree of substantiality in the Individual if we regarded it as the meeting point of an indefinite number of other Universals which it certainly is. Will not the fact that they all meet in that point give the point sufficient unity for us to be able to assert of each of them in turn that the Individual has that Universal? This looks plausible. For when we have reached to Judgments of Subsumption, and regard each Universal as having a different field of denotation, then, the more separate Universals you predicate of any Individual, the more completely do you define it and mark it off from all others. But we have not reached that point here. We are only dealing with Judgments of Inherence. We know nothing of fields of denotation. We have only the single Individual, and we have to relate the Universals to it, with- out taking any other Individuals into account. And, therefore, at the present stage of the dialectic, to pre- dicate overlapping Universals of the same Individual does not remove the contradiction, but only aggravates it. If we say " This is sweet and beautiful," we have a double absurdity instead of a single one. We cannot identify This with either sweet or beautiful, since they are Universals, and This is an Individual. And even if we could identify it with either, we certainly could not identify it with both, since they are not identical with one another, and it is quite pos- sible to be sweet without being beautiful, or beautiful with- out being sweet. To sum up, then, it appears impossible to affirm a Universal of an isolated Individual. If we say that the Individual has it, we are compelled to assert that the Indi- vidual is some other Universal. And by the very fact that one is an Individual and the other a Universal, we know that they cannot be identical. The only case where is can in this sense connect subject and predicate is the Identical Judgment A is A. Even formal logic recognises this as- the reductio ad absurdum of Judgment, and here, where it is essential that the predicate shall be a Universal, it is still more obvious that it is useless. There seems, however, to be a refuge open to us. Our Positive Judgments have broken down because the subject and the predicate could not be made to coincide. Now, in a Negative Judgment the assertion is precisely that they do not coincide. We reach here, then, the Negative Judg- ment.