Josiah Royce

“ On the other hand, breadth of view is secured by two devices, not unfamiliar in themselves, but here carried out with great industry. The one device is that of the historical comparison of logical doctrines, the other that of great variety in the choice of concrete examples of logical forms, principles, and processes. ”

“ Abstraction is an affair of attention (p. 48) . It does not really sunder, it emphasizes; and for its emphasis it is largely dependent upon the flow of consciousness, which presents the Vorstellungen that are to be the object of the abstracting process.
A passage from this theory of abstraction to the theory of judgment, as indicated above, is contained in our author's doctrine of the significance of language for the thinking process. Abstract ideas are made possible by means of "sprachlicher Ueberlieferung" (p. 49) . ”

“ Not only is intension thus prior to extension, and of far deeper significance than the latter, but, in view of the rejection of all forms of the "subsumption theory," we are driven (p. 261) to define the judgment as a "Gleichheitsbeziehung der Einordnung" — a technical expression which needs some elucidation, but which is at all events the embodiment of an interpretation of the process of judgment in terms of intension. The predicate of a judgment points out elements or groups of elements which, intensively regarded, were already immanent in the idea of the subject. Such is Erdmann's view. ”

“ Our relative abstractions we accomplish, in the more complex cases, only by virtue of bringing into consciousness a series of Vorstellungen whose common features are strengthened through Verschmelzung, while the individual features of each Vorstellung are kept in the background by virtue of that very flow of consciousness which helps us to attend to the common features themselves. ”

“ The imagination is excited to the formation of abstract ideas by the aid and the usage of language (p. 51) . In particular the whole activity of judgment depends upon language (p. 20 sqq.) . Perception and mere Vorstellen can go on without speech; but judgment, which (p. 1) is the essential characteristic of the thinking process (" unter Denken soll nichts anderes als Urtheilen verstanden werden") , is impossible without some sort of language (pp. 23, 234) . Erdmann undertakes more than once, and at considerable length, a psychological proof of this assertion ”