Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/214

200 ARTHUE O. LOVEJOY: unharmonisable alternatives Leibniz left the problem of metaphysical method to his successors. What has rarely been remarked is that those successors the immediate predecessors of Kant took up the problem and gave a reasonably clear answer to it ; that to the funda- mental Leibnitian principle they gave an enlarged but an explicitly defined meaning, corresponding to the second and sounder of the alternatives suggested by Leibniz ; that be- tween this enlarged meaning and the narrower one from which Leibniz had not fully distinguished it, they drew an unequivocal distinction, corresponding to Kant's distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments ; that they thus answered in advance Kant's question : " How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" and answered it in a sense to which Kant could not consistently have made objection. It was, of course, Wolff who accomplished this advance upon the position of Leibniz ; Baumgarten, and Kant's contemporary and critic, Eberhard, did little more than re- arrange or expand Wolff's ideas. What Wolff did was, in the first place, distinctly to abandon the theory that the only thing that you can logically discover a priori about any con- cept is that it must always mean whatever it happens to mean. On the contrary, he remarks in an instructive pas- sage of the Hora Subsecivce (1730, vol. i, p. 154), we ought to recognise that there are such things as notiones fcecunda " pregnant concepts " of which the peculiarity is that they contain determinationes rei, per quas cetera qua rei conveniunt, colligi possunt ; in other words, they are such that ex Us, qua in iisdem continentur, certa ratiocinandi lecje colliguntur alia qiuB, in iisdem non continentur. It is because it is a fact of psycho- logy that there are such pregnant notions, that we are able to frame a number of propositions quarum pradicatis positis, ponuntur alia ejusdem rei prcedicata. Here, then, we find Wolff asserting that some ideas contain within themselves- inseparable from, yet not expressed in. their formally defined essence necessary implications as to their relations of co- predicability or incompatibility with other ideas ; and that meanings are thus organically interconnected. Now in the technical logical and metaphysical treatises of Wolff and his school, the theory here implied as to the grounds of the legitimacy of synthetic judgments a priori is set forth with great fulness and definiteness and copious iteration. In summarising the doctrine I shall quote in part from the Acroasis Logica of Baumgarten, which, while follow- ing Wolffs expressions without significant deviation, is some- times more concise and compact. Logic, says Baumgarten,