30. The Place of the Judgment and of the Proposition in Intellectual Life. -- Not only is the judgment the central act towards which all the operations of thought converge, but there is in reality no intellectual act which does not end in judgment.

Each of the abstractive acts of the intelligence grasps one of the attributes of the known object separately -- e. g., one quality of this tree which my senses perceive, the shape of the trunk or of the branches, the roughness of the bark, the color of the foliage, and so on.

But each one of these acts is accompanied by the apprehension of something subsisting, of a subject from which I borrow, and to which I give back, the abstract attribute.

To abstract these attributes -- the shape, the roughness. the color of this tree -- is only to attribute them mentally to this indeterminate subject which I am seeking to specify, to say within myself that they belong to it, to judge that a tree is what they express.

The science of language confirms and illustrates the teachings of consciousness.

To create a name (or noun) is, in fact, to apply a concept, moulded in the form of language, to some subject designated indeterminately by a demonstrative pronoun, this or that. To name this animal that which tears to pieces (Vr Ka, lupus, wolf) is to apply to the creature an abstract concept, that of the act of tearing to pieces.