MS 1334 (1905) - Adirondack Summer School Lectures

Critical ethics will be the science of the general conditions of control; and it is easy to see that it comes chiefly to the doctrine of self-control.

Logic is takes its start in that. It is but an application of morals and ethics to thought. For reasoning differs from the formation of a new belief by the action of the association of ideas only be being a deliberate, controlled piece of conduct.

However, the one sole way to make logic success in logic is to regard it as a science of signs; and I defined it in 1867 as the theory of the relation of symbols to their objects. Further experience has convinced me that the best plan is to consider logic as embracing more than that, and

For the different between reasoning and the creation of a new belief by the association of ideas is that reasoning is self controlled thought, or thought under control tamed and trained.

the general theory of signs of all kinds, not merely in their relation to their objects but in every way.

This way of thinking upon logic is the one salvation for the science. You will object. You will say, "What have not these signs got to be understood by some mind?" I reply, yes, undoubtedly. But when you speak vaguely of some mind's understanding them, you mingle confusedly many circumstances, some of them essential, but furnishing no

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science until they are separated and each is definitely recognized in its precise functions and the merely accidental circumstances cleared away. What is thinking? It can only take place in signs. What is it to understand a sign? It is merely that the sign is interpreted in a sign in your minds. The whole function of the mind is to make a sign interpret itself in another sign and ultimately perhaps in an action or in an emotion. But the emotion is an idle thing unless it leads to an action. The action is an idle thing unless it produces a result which agrees with a sign through a sign. The whole problem is of signs; and if a mind has to be taken into account, it should be considered

in its relation to signs.

There will be no preparation for understanding these lectures, which, judging by great psychologists, are not easy to understand, and I may say I am sure they are quite impossible to understand from the psychological standpoint [??] since they turn principally upon elements of experience that the psychologist takes pains to shut out from view,—I say there is no better preparation than that of spending an hour more or less, remembering for how very short a time attention can be on the stretch without relaxation, in spending then the remnants of an hour most of it given to rest and to bringing attention back, in thinking how thought is a dialogue discourse of the self that has been to the critical self that is coming. "I says to myself," say the wise unlearned. Thought is nothing but a tissue of

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signs. The objects concerning which though is occupied are signs. To try to strip off the signs and get down to the very meaning itself is like trying to peel an onion and get down to the very onion itself. "You may get down, however, to actions," say some of the pragmatists. I beg their pardon. You may get down to resolutions to act. But they are not actions but signs of actions. Get down to the [??] very actions themselves and you can no longer find in them the meanings of the signs. Let us talk about yonder chair. "Chair" is a word. It is a sign. The Vorstellung chair is a sign. What will you have. Get down to the very impressions of sense, and there is no chair there. The life we lead is a life of signs. Sign under Sign endlessly. In one of my early papers, in the second Volume of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy,