MS 298-299 Phaneroscopy

φαν10

nor does it lead us into the divarications of those who know no other logic than a “Natural History” of thought. As to this, remark, I pray you, that “Natural History” is the term applied to the descriptive sciences of nature, that is to say, to sciences which describe different kinds of objects and classify them as well as they can while they still remain ignorant of their essences and of the ultimate agencies of their production and which seek to explain the properties of those kinds by means of laws which another branch of science called “Natural Philosophy” has established. Thus a logic which is a natural history merely, has done no more than observe that certain conditions have been found attached to sound thought, but has no means of ascertaining whether the attachment be accidental or essential; and quite ignoring the circumstance that the very essence of thought lies open to our study; which study alone it is that men have always called “logic,” or “dialectic.”

φαν11 [see 11 bis]

Accordingly, when I say that Existential Graphs put before us moving pictures of thought, I mean of thought in its essence free from physiological and other accidents. But why, Reader, do you still pester me so for further elucidation of what I mean by “Thought”? Has not my metaphor of the onion told you? [Insert here 11 quater.] This one shall be redolent of a different aroma; so that you shall not be surfeited with monstrous delight!

A soul, as most men rightly think, cannot live without a body, though it will preserve its identity through all metempsychoses and through all the oblivia thereto appertaining; whether this body be of that kind that we can readily comprehend,— I mean the spiritual body,— to the existence of which the spiritualists at last begin to awaken my torpid intelligence*, or whether

* It was the consideration of the utter inadaptability of the theory of telepathy to explain the assumed facts that it was framed to explain, that first made me see that spiritualism alone could explain many of those facts, assuming them to be such. It was not that I had any a priori objection to telepathy; for on the contrary, it seemed then to me, as it does now, that there must be such a faculty in some minute degree; and when the whip of one brain-cell is attracted to another cell (and, though no man has seen it or can as yet see it, Raymon y Cajal’s idea that it does happen is irresistible), what can this be, internally viewed,

φαν11 quater

You remind me of some athlete, capable of doing a lot of wonderful feats upon the trapeze and the slack rope, able to balance a long pole upon his nose with a glass of wine standing unspilled on the end of it, but who has now been vainly trying for a quarter of an hour to thread a cambric needle, and whose unfailing failures would provoke my laughter, if I were not myself so intent upon seeing him succeed. It is that he is too right-handed as to the use of his eyes, and looking at the needle with his right eye alone, though he sees it with both, while this eye being off at one side, he always misses the eye of the needle. Do, for God’s sake, and for the sake of God’s truth, try to look with that unpracticed eye of your mind! Learn to look with both eyes at once! Good, my heart warms to you at seeing your cool and active perseverance! I must try if a fresh metaphor will not help you.

φαν11 bis [See 11 ter]

the body be of that mysterious nature that we call “matter.” The soul without the body is simply an impossibility and an absurdity. The soul in the body certainly has characters utterly incongruous to those of a body without a soul, however. A sign must have an interpretation, or signification. This interpretant, this signification is simply a metempsychosis into another body; a translation into another language. This new version of the thought receives, in turn, an interpretation, and its interpretant gets itself interpreted, and so on, until an interpretant appears which is no longer of the nature of a sign; and this I am to show to you by good evidence is, for one class of signs, a Quality, and for another, a Deed; but for intellectual concepts, is a conditional determination of the soul as to how it would conduct itself under conceivable circumstances. (I here merely give a roughly simplified statement that must receive fine corrections further on, in a part of my argument which I am relegating to another article.) That ultimate, definitive, and final (i.e. eventually to be reached,) interpretant (final I mean, in the logical sense of attaining the purpose, is also final in the sense of bringing the series of translations to [?????] for the obvious reason that it is not itself a sign) is to be regarded as the ultimate signification of the sign. But [??????] this perfect fruit of thought can hardly itself be called thought, since it has no signification and does not belong to the faculty of cognition at all; but rather to the character.

φαν11 ter [Next comes φαν11 ter continued]

Besides, there present themselves, at this stage of our meditation, some curious distinctions for which no parallels occur to me beyond the sphere of thought. Namely, we have, in the first place, to distinguish between waking thought,— thought clothed and in its right mind,— thought in full possession of its own essential faculties,— and what I may call hypnotic thought, which is confined to thinking what has been explicitly and very imperatively suggested to it to think, and can think of nothing else. You may object that the so-called hypnotic thought has either not been deprived of any essential character of thought, as I talk as if it had, or else, by the definition of the term “essential,” is not properly called “thought,” at all. Well, well; the fixing up of its phrases belongs to the decorative department of the edification, or [???????]: at present we are engaged upon in the structural part of the work of science,— or its ecodomesis, if I may borrow a word from Plato, who, I fancy, copied it from Thucydides;— at present, we have not come to that stage of the work, being still occupied with structural parts. I do not see anything exorbitant in my petition to be allowed to use the word ‘thought’, as it is often used, though not with very accurate discrimination, to denote the only thing that is stowed [over]