Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/220

206 ARTHUR O. LOVE JOY : make them more intelligible to myself " (Kr. d. r. V., first ed.,. pp. 7, 8). In the Prolegomena Kant goes so far as to say that the notion which serves as the predicate of such a judgment is actually always expressly present to the mind when the subject is thought; the judgment " expresses nothing in the predicate but what has already been wirklich gedacht (though not ausdrilcklich gesagt) in the subject ". Leibniz, in his narrowest definitions, would have avoided such language ; for he at least placed judgments virtualiter identicae side by side with the purely tautological ones. And occasionally Kant himself remembers that concepts sometimes- implicitly in- volve more than one happens, at any given moment, con- sciously to think in them. He then adds that the predicate of an analytical judgment may be contained in the subject " in a confused manner," or " without full consciousness ". What this vague qualification precisely means Kant does not further explain. It apparently refers, not to the implicit in- terconnexion of " properties " in the connotation of an idea,, but merely to the fact that people sometimes forget just what some of the essentialia are that they are accustomed to signify by a term. The qualification cannot, therefore, be- construed as equivalent to the admission of the distinctness and the legitimacy of a priori judgments per attributa. &So far, then, and considering only Kant's principal writings, e must say, not that Kant rejects the position of the ' dog- atists,' but that he neglects to face or to oppose it at all. With a degree of obtuseness rare in history, he entirely failed to apprehend the distinction that had been the principal re- sult of the previous half-century of reflexion upon the criteria of truth in mathematics and metaphysics the distinction,, namely, between a priori judgments per essentialia and a priori judgments per attributa even though this distinction contained an answer to just the question which he himself declared to be the fundamental one in all philosophy. Hi& 'attacks upon his predecessors implied that, having no cri- terion of truth a priori save the principle of contradiction in its narrowest analytical sense, they proceeded none the less (in their ignorance of Hume) to construct an a priori system of metaphysics. But since the criterion which they used was quite other, and since their reasons for accepting it had been carefully explained, Kant cannot be said to have brought any pertinent criticism to bear upon their position at all. The longer treatises nowhere make it certain that, if Kant had grasped the Wolman distinction, he would not have accepted the Wolman method. Fortunately, however, Kant was reminded of this dis-