SUO: Re: Determination
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| Taking it for granted, then, that the inner and outer worlds are
| superposed throughout, without possibility of separation, let us
| now proceed to another point. There is a third world, besides the
| inner and the outer; and all three are coëxtensive and contain every
| experience. Suppose that we have an experience. That experience has
| three determinations -- three different references to a substratum or
| substrata, lying behind it and determining it. In the first place,
| it is a determination of an object external to ourselves -- we feel
| that it is so because it is extended in space. Thereby it is in the
| external world. In the second place, it is a determination of our own
| soul, it is 'our' experience; we feel that it is so because it lasts in
| time. Were it a flash of sensation, there for less than an instant, and
| then utterly gone from memory, we should not have time to think it ours.
| But while it lasts, and we reflect upon it, it enters into the internal
| world. We have now considered that experience as a determination of the
| modifying object and of the modified soul; now, I say, it may be and is
| naturally regarded as also a determination of an idea of the Universal
| mind; a preëxistent, archetypal Idea. Arithmetic, the law of number,
| 'was' before anything to be numbered or any mind to number had been
| created. It 'was' though it did not 'exist'. It was not 'a fact'
| nor a thought, but it was an unuttered word. 'En arche en o logos'.
| We feel an experience to be a determination of such an archetypal
| Logos, by virtue of its // 'depth of tone' / logical intension //,
| and thereby it is in the 'logical world'.
|
| Note the great difference between this view and Hegel's.
| Hegel says, logic is the science of the pure idea. I should
| describe it as the science of the laws of experience in virtue
| of its being a determination of the idea, or in other words as
| the formal science of the logical world.
|
| In this point of view, efforts to ascertain precisely how the
| intellect works in thinking, -- that is to say investigation
| of internal characterictics -- is no more to the purpose which
| logical writers as such, however vaguely have in view, than
| would be the investigation of external characteristics.
|
| CSP, CE 1, pages 168-169.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lecture I, 1865",
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.
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