Chapter 23

Fourth psychological law:
knowledge obtained through affirmation or denial (word)

1485. But what the spirit adds is the word , that is, the interior word with which it affirms or denies.
With this act the spirit acquires a new cognition but not, we must carefully note, a new object . What the spirit pronounces presupposes the object given it through intuition, perception or reasoning. The object is as it were the matter of the spirit's pronouncement.

1486. Because the word, the judgment, the affirmation (or whatever we call it) is moved by the influence of practical reason upon theoretical reason, it has its cause more in practical than in theoretical reason. Nevertheless by a kind of psychological instinct the act of affirmation sometimes follows immediately upon theoretical vision.

1487. The spirit cannot perform this act of the interior word unless it finds in the object a duality which can become predicate and subject. Simple intuition allows no pronouncement or judgment because infinite, ideal ens divided from all reality is so uniform that it does not admit multiplicity.(284) If the spirit is to be able to affirm or deny, it must be put in communication with some real being, the source of plurality.

1488. But if the word adds no new object to the spirit, what is the nature of the spirit's cognition acquired through the word?

The cognition produced by the mental word differs totally from that produced by the idea (ens).
The former is subjective , the latter essentially objective , as we have seen. By subjective cognition I do not mean false cognition; I mean that this cognition, unlike the cognition coming from the idea, does not have its truth within itself but must receive its truth from the idea, from the object, by harmonising and adapting itself to the object.

1489. The object, the ens, the idea, which is truth itself and as it were synonymous with the truth, is superior to true and false.(285) 'True' and 'false' pertain to the pronouncements of the spirit, not to the object.

1490. We now have a solution to the famous sophism of the ancients, which runs as follows:
'We think only an ens and therefore can pronounce only an ens, because a non-ens is neither thinkable nor pronounceable. But an ens and what is true are the same thing. Therefore everything we think and pronounce is true.'(286) I deny the major when understood in its totality. In other words, when distinguishing its parts, I say:
'We think only an ens.' Here I make the following distinction. If the sentence is used to express objective thought, I grant its accuracy; if it is used to express all thought, including subjective thought (which pronounces something about the ens), I deny it.

'And therefore can pronounce only an ens'. I deny this also. 'To pronounce' is to affirm or deny something. The object of a pronouncement is not an ens, but the nexus, that is the predication itself.
We can indeed pronounce that an ens is false or true, but in this case it is the pronouncement, a subjective operation of the spirit, which is false, not the ens.

1491. As far as I know, philosophers have neither felt the force of this most important distinction, nor sufficiently known and described the nature of subjective cognition resulting from a pronouncement, judgment or word of the spirit.

What then is the nature of this way of knowledge?

It does not consist in the spirit's acquisition of a new object, as I said above, but is 'the power the spirit has to dispose itself in a certain mode relative to the object before it.' In one mode the spirit affirms, in another it denies, although the object, 'the essence of what is seen in the idea' (as I have said), remains the same. There is neither affirmation nor denial in the object; only the spirit affirms or denies. Essence, whether we affirm or deny anything of it, remains the same. For example, I deny that there is a pear or a fig in the garden. The essence (my mental object ) of the pear or fig remains what it was before my denial. My spirit has simply denied that the essence is realised in the garden. The same is true if I affirm the presence of the pear; its essence would remain unaltered.

1492. What effect does this act produce in the spirit, and what do we call this effect or disposition? I have called it 'persuasion'. This kind of knowledge can be called 'knowledge by persuasion' or 'knowledge by predication'. The ancients sometimes confused persuasion with opinion , but the two differ greatly: opinion can be joined either to a firm or to a weak, vacillating persuasion.

1493. I will now suggest solutions to possible difficulties. The object intuited and grasped directly by the spirit is one thing; the subsequent predication made by the spirit is another. The spirit does not err in its intuition and apprehension,(287) but can err in its predication, which may conform or deviate from the object.
Here difficulties easily arise, which could be presented in the following way: 'If I predicate something of the object, the predicate itself must be an object. In this case, the term of my knowledge by predication is an object, a new object.'
I reply. The term of knowledge by predication is not an object of any kind; it is the union of subject and predicate, not the subject and predicate in themselves. I know this union in the object through the predication made by my spirit.
It may then be objected that the object of knowledge by predication is the union itself of subject and predicate. This knowledge therefore has an object of its own, a new object supplied by the spirit.

This reasoning reveals one of those common illusions which are very difficult to avoid. I always try to identify them because they prevent the mind from philosophising accurately.

The illusion is this.

The relationship between predicate and subject can be considered solely as possible (intuitable). Considered as such, the relationship is an object, which is known by intuition, not by predication . For example, when I say, 'This body is cold', I predicate coldness of the body and am persuaded that the body is cold. But before affirming that the body is cold, I can conceive the relationship between the coldness and the body without affirming the relationship. In this case I intuit the relationship simply as possible. At the same time I can also intuit a relationship between the body and heat. But I still do not affirm either relationship. By having the intuition of these possible relationships, my spirit possesses the object, which it can either affirm or deny. When my spirit actually affirms or denies the object, it is already in possession of the object. Consequently my affirmation or denial does not concern possession of the object; they simply provide my spirit with the persuasion that one of the two relationships intuited as possible is; when my spirit pronounces that the relationship is, it is persuaded.

1494. 'But what does this "is" signify, pronounced about one or other of the two possible, contradictory relationships?' 'Is' has two significations: either the act of ideal being or the act of real being. If the affirmation remains within the sphere of possibility, which is the case of logical or mathematical affirmations (for example, 'The consequence IS contained in the principle', or 'The sum of the three angles of a triangle IS equal to two right angles'), the copulative IS simply signifies ideal being. If the affirmation enters the sphere of reality, as in the case of physical affirmation (for example, 'This metal IS gold', 'The sun IS a body'), the copulative IS signifies a reality pertaining to a real subject. The subject can also be an ens abstracted from its forms, with the predicate as its real form; for example, 'This ens subsists', where subsistence , that is, reality, is taken as the predicate of the essence of the ens.

If the copulative IS, which is always pronounced in the predication, signifies ideal being, the process is as follows. Ideal ens is the object. If this object were not present to the mind, the spirit could predicate nothing about it. But the object is present to the mind, and the mind intuits it in its totality according to the ontological laws I have described. But in addition to the intuitive faculty in the spirit, a faculty of abstraction is also present. This abstraction is carried out by means of limitation and concentration of attention. Abstraction does not destroy the object but divides it up and distinguishes its elements. This action, because subjective , does not affect the object, which remains intact in itself present to the mind. The mind now possesses not only the total object through intuition, but also the object divided into its elements through abstraction.

This abstraction , a kind of analysis or dismantling, is the origin of predication , a kind of synthesis joining the separated elements. When I say analysis and synthesis , I am talking about the form of the spirit's act and not strictly speaking about the result of the two processes. In fact we can divide the form of a synthesis when we deny a predicate to a subject instead of affirming it. But because our discussion here concerns subjective actions, we must note their form, not their result. If the predication is false as a result of a union between an element of the object and an element not pertaining to the object, the spirit pronounces an absurdity (in the world of ideas, of course), which is only a putative object. The spirit pronounces an absurdity because, when it affirms an ideal predicate of an ideal subject, as in this case, the affirmation concerns possibility ; to pronounce as possible what is impossible is simply to pronounce an absurdity. The predication of possibility means therefore to acknowledge what is known , to affirm the intuition of what is intuited. But in the case of pure acknowledgement, that is, knowing in another way something already known, no new object is presented to our mind; we merely change the mode with which our spirit seeks to know the same object. This different mode, which cannot pertain to the object, pertains to the subject, and is simply a new disposition assumed by the spirit relative to the object, a disposition called subjective or persuasive cognition . When this cognition conforms to the object, it is true; when it does not conform, it is false.

1495. If the copulative IS signifies real being, as in the examples I have given, the same thing applies, except that the elements of predication are not given by abstraction. Hence if the judgment is false, it is not necessarily absurd. For example, when I say, 'This metal is gold', although it is brass, I pronounce a non-absurd falsehood; the metal can in fact be conceived as gold. Similarly, when I say, 'The phoenix subsists', I say something false, but not impossible.

Here the elements of judgment are given partly by feeling, at least on the part of the predicate , which is something real. 'Real' means 'what happens in feeling', which is subjective and totally outside the object of the mind. The spirit, which is subject, performs an act by which it unites the feeling-predicate (real) with the subject under discussion. This subject may itself be real, or perhaps essential being abstracted from its forms. But the union of identity produces nothing new in the object; it takes place totally in the subject that accomplishes it and of which it is a new disposition, a disposition which constitutes subjective cognition .

1496. In fact I have already distinguished between the subject's fundamental union with the object (effected through intuition) and the more intimate union that the subject effects with its object. This second union pertaining, as I said, to operative or practical reason , does not produce a new object but a new degree and mode of union. It does produce however a new cognition , true or false, relative to the object.

1497. Reality is certainly added in this case, but reality is not a new object; it is a predicate, an appurtenance of the previous perceived object. If this previous object were the essence of bread intuited in the idea of bread, then when I say 'The bread subsists', I simply add reality to the object already known (ideal bread). The reality is a subjective feeling, not an object. Consequently, although the subject of the proposition is truly an object, the predicate is not; on the contrary, it is rather a term of affirmation, a subjective term, present in the feeling of bread. The proposition is equivalent to: 'The bread, an object of my mind, has a mode of being outside my mind, and this mode of being is sensible to me in one way or another.' Note carefully: if 'sensible being' is understood as an object of the mind and not as a feeling, it is something possible, but devoid of affirmation; it is not what we are discussing. If the two terms of the proposition, 1. the bread, 2. the subsistence, are considered as possible, they are objects, and in this case subsistence is no longer subsistence but the idea of subsistence . We have returned to the ideal order but not yet pronounced any connection between these objects, although when we do, our pronouncement does not add another object. As long as we intuit the connection as possible, we neither pronounce nor affirm it. When we affirm it, it becomes a persuasion, a subjective cognition.

In the ideal essence therefore of an ens, reality is already contained as ideal. But properly speaking this is reality for the human spirit only when the spirit affirms it. The spirit affirms the intuited object and does so because it feels the object. This affirmation is purely a new mode by which the spirit unites the object to itself.

Notes

(284) NE, vol. 2, 552.

(285) Ibid ., 1062-1064; 1112-1135.

(286) Cf. Plato in Euthydemus , Cratylus , Sophist and Theaetetus . He attributes the invention of this sophism to philosophers who preceded Protagoras, although this famous sophist made great use of it.

(287) NE, vol. 3, 1247-1278.