Judgment

When making judgments, how do people behave with regard to external influences? Here, we raise a question which appears to apply only to the intellectual side of a personality since it penetrates deep into the heart of mental individuality. I wish to avoid going into detail about the difficult theory of judgment here. Let me simply point out one thing: Judgment is more than an indifferent mental content, more than a representation or accumulation of representations; it is an active positioning of the personality as a whole vis-à-vis the content currently present and, as such, counts as one of the acts of the will. Consequently, the dynamics of judgment that can be observed in any specific individual are related to the characteristic way in which his acts of will emerge and proceed in general. Characteristics such as decisiveness, reliability, suggestibility can refer just as much to the execution of actions as they can to the making of judgments, and the so-called “temperament” of a person shines through not only in his practical but also in his theoretical behavior with regard to things.