of thought nor those of fact can be arrested or presented without the aid of language or some equivalent system of signs.  The Conceptualist may urge that the Nominalist’s forms of statement and argument exist for the sake of their meaning, namely, judgments and reasonings; and that the Materialist’s laws of Nature are only judgments founded upon our conceptions of Nature; that the truth of observations and experiments depends upon our powers of perception; that perception is inseparable from understanding, and that a system of Induction may be constructed upon the axiom of Causation, regarded as a principle of Reason, just as well as by considering it as a law of Nature, and upon much the same lines.  The Materialist, admitting all this, may say that a judgment is only the proximate meaning of a proposition, and that the ultimate meaning, the meaning of the judgment itself, is always some matter-of-fact; that the other schools have not hitherto been eager to recognise the unity of Deduction and Induction or to investigate the conditions of trustworthy experiments and observations within the limits of human understanding; that thought is itself a sort of fact, as complex in its structure, as profound in its relations, as subtle in its changes as any other fact, and therefore at least as hard to know; that to turn away from the full reality of thought in perception, and to confine Logic to artificially limited concepts, is to abandon the effort to push method to the utmost and to get as near truth as possible; and that as to Causation being a principle of Reason rather than of Nature, the distinction escapes his apprehension, since Nature seems to be that to which our private minds turn upon questions of Causation for correction and instruction; so that if he does not call Nature the Universal Reason, it is because he loves severity of style.

CHAPTER II

GENERAL ANALYSIS OF PROPOSITIONS

Sec. 1.  Since Logic discusses the proof or disproof, or (briefly) the testing of propositions, we must begin by explaining their nature.  A proposition, then, may first be described in the language of grammar as a sentence indicative; and it is usually expressed in the present tense.

It is true that other kinds of sentences, optative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory, if they express or imply an assertion, are not beyond the view of Logic; but before treating such sentences, Logic, for greater precision, reduces them to their equivalent sentences indicative.  Thus, I wish it were summer may be understood to mean, The coming of summer is an object of my desire. Thou shalt not kill may be interpreted as Murderers are in danger of the judgment.  Interrogatories, when used in argument, if their form is affirmative, have negative force, and affirmative force if their form is negative.  Thus, Do hypocrites love virtue? anticipates the answer, No. Are