An introductory text-book of logic - Mellone, Sydney - Rare Books at ...

THE PROBLEMS WHICH WE HAVE RAISED. 341
patible with what we deny. In other words, we deny
a proposition only because we have in our minds an
affirmative counter -proposition which excludes the
former one. The principle of Contradiction expresses
the nature and character of the negative by saying that
it cannot be true together with the affirmative. If I
assert of a distant object that
"
it is not red," I do so
because I think the question of its being red has been or
may be raised, and also because I think that it is some
other colour which is incompatible with red. If I make
the statement "A republic does not necessarily secure
good government," I make it because I think that the
contradictory, "All republics necessarily secure good
government," is an opinion actually or possibly held,
and also because I think there are cases where repub
lican governments have been bad and corrupt. Thus
every negative judgment has a positive implication.
When we have expressed a negative judgment in
the form
"
S is not the P," negative does not belong to the
predicate. The forms of the proposition to which the
processes of obversion, &c., lead, are artificial; they
do not naturally occur, for we never affirm "not-P"
of S. If we did make such an affirmation, we must
have passed through a denial to reach it; if S accepts
"not-P," we must already have learnt that it rejects
P. In fact, as we implied when first dealing with
this subject (ch. II.
4),
"
"
not-P
is a purely formal
conception, summing up and containing under it any
possible contrary. We never make the bare idea of
the contradictory the predicate of a judgment. There
is no motive for making such assertions. Mr Bosan-
quet has observed that though "what we say always
approaches the Contradictory, what we mean always
approaches the Contrary."