Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
Psychologie. This work, which is almost completed, will be a further development, and not
just a continuation, of my Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. 31
I will now add the following remarks in opposition to what Windelband has to say.
(1) He writes, on page 172, that according to me “love and hate” is not an appropriate
designation for this third class of psychological phenomena; indeed, he attributes to me a
quotation to this, effect. But he is entirely mistaken and has made a serious oversight—as
he could verify for himself if he were to re-read Volume I, page 262, of my Psychologie.†
(2) On page 178, he says that, according to me, the only classification of judgements
which pertains to the act of judging itself is the classification according to quality; but this
too is a mistake and one which is entirely unjustified. My own belief is just the contrary.
Thus, unlike Windelband, I believe that the distinction between assertoric and apodictic
judgements and the distinction between evident and blind judgements both pertain to the
act of judgement itself, and that these distinctions are of basic importance. And there are
still other distinctions—for example, the distinction between simple and compound acts
of judgement. 32 For it is not possible to resolve every compound judgement into entirely
simple elements. The same can be said of certain compound concepts, as Aristotle had
seen. What is it to be red? To be coloured red. What is it to be coloured? To have the quality
of being coloured. In each case the concept of the genus is contained in that of the specific
difference; the separability of the one logical element from the other is thus one-sided. And
we find the same situation, I believe, with respect to certain compound judgements. J.S.Mill
said that to classify judgements as simple and complex would be like classifying horses
as single horses and teams of horses.* But Mill is quite wrong in ridiculing this traditional
classification; for his argument would apply equally well to the distinction between simple
and compound concepts.
(3) Still another mistake—which almost everyone has made and which I too had
made in the first volume of the Psychologie—is that of supposing that one’s “degree of
conviction”, so-called, is a kind of intensity analogous to the intensity of pleasure and
pain. Were Windelband to accuse me of this mistake, his accusation would be entirely just.
Instead, however, he criticizes me because I say that the so-called intensity of conviction is
only analogous, and not equivalent, to the strict sense of intensity which applies to pleasure
and pain, and because I say that the supposed intensity of conviction and the real intensity
of feeling are not comparable with respect to magnitude. This is one of the consequences
of what Windelband takes to be his improved theory of judgement!
If a man’s belief that 2+1=3 had a degree of conviction which was literally an intensity,
consider how powerful it would be! And if, as Windelband would have it (p. 186), the
belief were a feeling in the strict sense of the word, and not merely something bearing a
certain analogy to feeling, consider the havoc and violence to which the nervous system
would be submitted! Our doctors might well tell us that, for the sake of our health, we
should avoid the study of mathematics. 33 (Compare what J.H. Newman has to say about the
so-called degree of conviction in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent—an interesting
work which has received but little notice in Germany.)
† [Second edition, Vol. II, p. 35 ff.]
* J.S.Mill, Logic, Vol. I, Chap. 4.