Page:Anarchism (Eltzbacher, 1908 English translation).djvu/36

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE PROBLEM
7

of Anarchism and its species." But we see daily that different men define in quite different ways the concept of an object which they yet conceive in the same way. One says that law is the general will; another, that it is a mass of precepts which limit a man's natural liberty for other men's sake; a third, that it is the ordering of the life of the nation (or of the community of nations) to maintain God's order of the world. They all know that a definition should state the proximate genus and the distinctive marks of the species, but this knowledge does them little good. So it seems that the goal of the study does still require elucidation.

Lastly rises the question, what is the way to this goal? Any one who has ever observed the conflict of opinions in the intellectual sciences knows well, on the one hand, how utterly we lack a recognized method for the solution of problems; and, on the other hand, how necessary it is in any study to get clearly in mind the method that is to be used.

2. Our study can come to a more precise specification of its problem. The problem is to put concepts in the place of non-conceptual notions of Anarchism and its species.

Every concept-determining study faces the problem of comprehending conceptually an object that was first comprehended non-conceptually, and therefore of putting a concept in the place of non-conceptual notions of an object. This problem finds a specially clear expression in the concept-determining judgment (the definition), which puts in immediate juxtaposition, in its subject some non-conceptual notion of an object,