MS 298-299 Phaneroscopy

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I had succeeded in making myself acquainted with the principal points in the substance of teachings of this system, recognizing them as true though I could know nothing of their resulting from any such picture of mind.

I do not claim that the Graphs furnish a perfect picture of any reasoning in respect to being photographically detailed, or that they fully represent all kinds of reasoning (though they approach doing this closer than might be supposed), or finally, that in their present state they are free from all faults.

Nor, as appears from what I have been saying, can I claim for the system that it is indispensable to achieving a comprehension of the structure and working of thought; but what I can, and do, claim for it is that it provides a singular and signal facilitation of that achievement, by so imaging the otherwise nebulous, ghostlike, dubious abstractions of metaphysics as to endue them with something of the distinctness of geometrical diagrams and with much of the convincingness of working models. Only, in order that this result should be attained, it is requisite that the reader should fully understand

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the relation of thought in itself to thinking, on the one hand, and to graphs, on the other hand. Those relations being once magisterially grasped, it will be seen that the Graphs break to pieces all the really serious barriers, not only to the logical analysis of thought but also to the digestion of a different lesson by rendering literally visible before one's very eyes the operation of thinking in actu. In order that the fact should come to light that the method of Graphs really accomplishes this marvellous result, it is first of all needful, or at least highly desirable, that the reader should have thoroughly assimilated, in all its parts, the truth that thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue,— a dialogue between different phases of the ego,— so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its Matter, in the sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen for its matter. Not that the particular

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signs employed are themselves the thought! Oh, no; no whit more than the skins of an onion are the onion. (About as much so, however.) One selfsame thought may be carried upon the vehicle of English, German, Greek, or Gaelic; in diagrams, or in equations, or in Graphs: all these are but so many skins of the onion, its inessential accidents. Yet that the thought should have some possible expression for some possible interpreter, is the very being of its being. Do I hear a mutter, something like this? “If he intends that thought is the meaning of the signs, I wonder what he can mean by his strange phrase, ‘the meaning of a concept’!” “Well, wonder on,” says the bully Bottom, “till Truth make all things plain;” that is, until the green-curtain of intellectual experience shall have rolled up and fully disclosed to you what the word “meaning” means.

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An unpenetrating study of the rules of Graphs would not much more aid a person to comprehend the common nature of the significance of thoughts than would an unpenetrating study of Greek or Gaelic grammar, the which would in its turn avail for the same purpose not very much more than would an unpenetrating study of the psychology of thinking. Now that would advance the problem no whit more than would the examination of the brain under a microscope, provided we could manage two things; first, to see how the whips of the brain-cells are thrashed about in life; and secondly, to recognize the significance of each lash. Those two things would, I dare say, do wonders for psychology; but they would probably not answer our logical purpose so well as will the study of the graphs.

How many writers of our generation, (if I must call names, in order to

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direct the reader to further acquaintance with a generally described character let it in this case be the distinguished Husserl), after underscored protestations that their discourse shall be of logic exclusively and not by any means of psychology (almost all logicians now put that protest on file), forthwith become intent upon those elements of the process of thinking which seem to be special to a mind like that of the human race, as we find it, to too great neglect of those elements which must belong as much to any one as to any other mode of embodying the same thought. It is one of the chief advantages of Existential Graphs, as a guide to Pragmaticism, that it holds up thought to our contemplation with the wrong side out, as it were; showing its construction in the barest and plainest manner, so that it neither seduces us into the bye-path of the distinctively English logicians,—