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a thing as the Secondness of Thirdness. But there is
no Secondness of Pure Firstness and no Thirdness of
Pure Firstness or Secondness. When you strive to
get the purest conceptions you can of Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness,— thinking of Quality,
Reaction, and Mediation,— what you are striving to
apprehend is Pure Firstness, the Firstness of Secondness,—
that is what Secondness is, of itself,—
and the Firstness of Thirdness. When you contrast
the blind compulsion of in an Event of Reaction
considered as something which happens and which
of its nature can never happen again, since
you cannot cross the same river twice, when,
I say, you contrast this compulsion with the
logical necessitation of a meaning considered