ONT Re: Just In Time Logic
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JITL. Note 14
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| I begin with the soul of man. For we first learn that brutes have souls from
| the facts of the human soul. What brutes and other men do & suffer would be
| quite unintelligible to us, if we had not a standard within ourselves with
| which to measure others.
|
| At the first dawn of cognition we began to compare and consider the objects about us.
| Our thought first assigned to things their right places and reduced the wild chaos
| of sensuous impressions to a luminous order. But after thought had classified
| everything a residuum was left over, which had no place in the classification.
| This was thought itself. What is this which is left over? After thought
| has considered everything, it is obliged next to think of itself. Here
| it is at once means and end. The question is, 'what' is thought, --
| and the question can only be answered 'by means of' thought.
|
| This is a noticeable circumstance. How can thought think of itself, it is
| asked; that would be an insoluble contradiction. It is as though a tone
| should be heard of itself, or a beam of light be seen by itself. But this
| objection reminds one of the efforts of the man who tried to look at his
| own eye. After great difficulty he got so far as to see the end of his
| nose, forgetting that it would be much simpler to hold up a looking-glass
| to his face. Common sense, which usually hits the nail on the head, has
| long ago held that looking-glass up to thought. If I wish to represent to
| myself what my thought is, (says common sense) I have only to act as though
| my thought were an external object which I can consider as I should consider
| something not a part of myself. Thought thus objectively considered common
| sense terms the soul. So if we are to investigate in a scientific manner
| the nature of thought, we //need/can// do nothing else than consider the
| soul as if it were an object of experience.
|
| Everyone grants that thought is a sort of experience; otherwise, we
| could not know that we think. Everyone further sees that we have in
| thought a very varied experience, for it changes both with the object
| thought of and with mental development which we have attained. Thus,
| we bring together all the experiences which thought has in itself &
| subject them to the consideration of our thoughts. There are also
| other experiences, not properly thoughts, such as sensations and
| feelings which we term phenomena of the soul, because we recognize
| them as immediate products of an activity within us, which according
| to our observation cannot be separated from the activity of thought.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CE 3, pp. 10-11.
|
| Charles S. Peirce, "Third Lecture", MS 192, Summer-Fall 1872, pages 10-11 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 3, 1872-1878',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1986.
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