MS 464-465 (1903) - Lowell Lecture III - 3rd Draught

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scratched with a knife, is hard just the same when nothing sharp presses upon it, or even if nothing sharp ever presses upon it. Its hardness, in that case, is nothing but an unrealized possibility. Now what is that? It is certainly nothing that reacts no subject of reaction. It does not belong, then, to the category of Secondness. I call this element of thought the conceived being such as it is positively, regardless of ought else, the element of Firstness. Everything you can possibly think of has its firstness. It is just what it is in itself is thought to be or otherwise is regardless of other things. It must be conceived to be something in itself in order to be in relation to other things.

But it is impossible to resolve everything in our thoughts into those two elements. We may say

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that the bulk of what is actually done consists of Secondness,— or better, Secondness is the predominant character of what has been done. The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the Quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness. But we constantly predict

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what is to be. Now what is to be, as we conceive, can according to our conception of it, can never become wholly past. In general, we may say that meanings are inexhaustible. We are too apt to think that what one means to do, and the meaning of a word are quite distinct unrelated meanings of the word meaning, or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind. Prof. Royce especially in his great work on The World and the Individual has done much to break up this mistake. In truth the only difference is that when a person means to do anything he is in some state in

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consequence of which the brute forces of reactions between things will be moulded to conformity to the form to which the man's mind is itself moulded, a possible idea which he sometimes does not while the meaning of a word really lies in the way clearly possess beforehand, while the meaning of in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded. Not only does will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists. For this reason I call this element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness. It is that which is what it is by virtue of giving imparting a quality to reactions in the future. There is a strong tendency in us all

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to be sceptical about there being any real meaning or law in things. This scepticism is strongest in the most masculine thinkers. I applaud scepticism with all my heart, provided it have four qualities, first that it be sincere and real doubt, second that it be aggressive, third that it push inquiry, and provided fourth, that it stand ready to acknowledge what it now doubts, as soon as the doubted element comes clearly to light. To be angry with sceptics, who, whether they are aware of it or not, are the best friends of spiritual truth, is a manifest sign that the angry person is himself infected with scepticism,— not, however, of the innocent and wholesome kind, that pushes tries to bring truth to light, but of the mendacious, clandestine, disguised, and conservative variety that is afraid of truth, although truth merely means the way to attain one's purposes. If the sceptics think that any account can

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