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he is
an “eye among the blind,” “On whom those thoughts do rest That we are toiling all our lives to find.” But as he grows up, he loses this faculty; and all through his childhood he has been stuffed with such a pack of lies, which parents are accustomed to think are the most wholesome food for the child,— because they do not think of his future,— that he begins real life with the utmost contempt for all the ideas of his childhood; and the great truth of the immanent power of thought in the universe is flung away along with the lies. I offer this hypothetical explanation because, if the common aversion to regarding
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68 Paging in other book should have 2 added to each page after 5, and 1 added to 5
thought as a real power, or as anything but a fantastic figment, were really natural, it would make an argument of no little strength against its really being acknowledged as a real power.
Those of you, ladies and gentlemen, who are interested in philosophy, as most of us are, more or less, would do well to get as clear notions of the three elements of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness as you can. Very wretched must be the notion of them that can be conveyed in one lecture. They must grow up in the mind, under the hot sun-shine of hard thought, daily, bright, well-focussed, and well aimed thought; and you must have patience, for
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long time is required to prod develope ripen the fruit. They are no inventions of mine. Were they so, that would be sufficient to condemn them. Confused notions of these elements appear in the first infancy of philosophy, and they have never entirely been forgotten. [insertion] In Kant they come out with an approach to lucidity. For Kant possessed in a high degree all seven of the mental qualifications of a philosopher,
1st, the ability to discern what is before one's consciousness; 2nd, Inventive originality; 3rd, Generalizing power; 4th, Subtlety;