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

Their fundamental importance is noticed in the beginning of Aristotle's De Caelo, where it is said that the Pythagoreans knew of them.

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5th, Critical severity and sense of fact; 6th, Systematic procedure; 7th, Energy, diligence, persistency, and exclusive devotion to philosophy. [insertion] Hegel, in some respects the greatest philosopher that ever lived, had a somewhat juster notion of this complication, though an inadequate notion, too. For if he had seen what the state of the case was, he would not have attempted in one lifetime to cover the vast field that he attempted to clear. But Hegel was lamentably deficient in that 5th requisite of critical severity and sense of fact. He brought out the three elements much more clearly. But the element of Secondness, of hard fact, is not accorded its due place in his system; and in a lesser degree the same is true of Firstness. After Hegel wrote, there came fifty years that were remarkably fruitful in all the means for attaining that 5th requisite.

But Kant had not the slightest suspicion of the inexhaustible intricacy of the fabric of conceptions, which is such that I do not flatter myself that I have ever analyzed a single idea into all its constituent elements.

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Yet Hegel's followers, instead of going to work to reform their master's system, and to render his statement of it obsolete, as every true philosopher must desire that his disciples should do, only proposed, at best, some superficial changes without replacing at all the rotten material with which the system was built up.

Things were in that condition when I devoted two years of daily hard labor, with active, wide-awake, thought, to making out, as well as I could, what the first categories really were. I have near a ream of carefully pondered statements of my work, and the result was a paper printed in 1867 and filling ten pages. When that was done, I dismissed the matter from my thoughts very largely and when I thought of cultivated

I shall not inflict upon you any account of my own labors. Suffice it to say that my results have afforded me great aid in the study of logic.

I will, however, make a few remarks on these categories. By way of preface, I must explain that in saying that the three, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness complete the list, I by no means deny that there are other categories. On the contrary, at every step of the every analysis, conceptions are met with which