on four wheels of flesh and blood, or grew planted in the ground, like Polydorus in the Æneid, as well evidenced as a great many nearly as marvellous stories.” Hence, in default of better inductions, it might have been convenient to make rough classifications of the facts which were and which were not to be accepted on testimony (the necessary, the impossible, &c.), and to employ these provisional inductions (which is all we should now regard them) as testing the stories which reached him. Propositions belonging to the class of the impossible might be regarded as having an antecedent presumption against them so great as to prevail over almost any testimony worth taking account of, and
§ 15. But this old four-fold division of modals continued to be accepted and perpetuated by the logicians long after all philosophical justification for it had passed away. So far as I have been able to ascertain, scarcely any logician of repute or popularity before Kant, was bold enough to make any important change in the way of regarding them.[11] Even the Port-Royal Logic, founded as it is on Cartesianism, repeats the traditional statements, though with extreme brevity. This adherence to the old forms led, it need not be remarked, to considerable inconsistency and confusion in many cases. These forms were founded, as we have seen, on an objective view of the province of logic, and this view was
by no means rigidly carried out in many cases. In fact it was beginning to be abandoned, to an extent and in directions which we have not opportunity here to discuss, before the influence of Kant was felt. Many, for instance, added to the list of the four, by including the true and the false; occasionally also the probable, the supposed, and the certain were added. This seems to show some tendency towards abandoning the objective for the subjective view, or at least indicates a hesitation between them.
§ 16. With Kant's view of modality almost every one is familiar. He divides judgments, under this head, into the apodeictic, the assertory, and the problematic. We shall have to say something about the number and mutual relations of these divisions presently; we are now only concerned with the general view which they carry out. In this respect it will be obvious at once what a complete change of position has been reached. The ‘necessary’ and the ‘impossible’ demanded an appeal to the matter of a proposition in order to recognize them; the ‘apodeictic’ and the ‘assertory’, on the other hand, may be true of almost any matter, for they demand nothing but an appeal to our consciousness in order to distinguish between them. Moreover, the distinction between the assertory and the problematic is so entirely subjective and personal, that it may vary not only between one person and another, but in the case of the same person at different times. What one man knows to be true, another may happen to be in doubt about. The apodeictic judgment is one which we not only accept, but which we find ourselves unable to reverse in thought; the assertory is simply accepted; the problematic is one about which we feel in doubt.
This way of looking at the matter is the necessary outcome of the conceptualist or Kantian view of logic. It has
been followed by many logicians, not only by those who may be called followers of Kant, but by almost all who have felt his influence. Ueberweg, for instance, who is altogether at issue with Kant on some fundamental points, adopts it.
§ 17. The next question to be discussed is, How many subdivisions of modality are to be recognized? The Aristotelian or scholastic logicians, as we have seen, adopted a four-fold division. The exact relations of some of these to each other, especially the possible and the contingent, is an extremely obscure point, and one about which the commentators are by no means agreed. As, however, it seems tolerably clear that it was not