MS 611-15

1908 Oct 29 Logic 20

having seriously made a business of finding out his errors, many of the opinions he still holds must be erroneous, could he only find out which opinions they are, and that he can will not be able to succeed in achieving his purposes, nor even be able to form purposes that would be permanently satisfactory to him in case he should achieve them, unless, having instituted forth with and then energetically carried out a systematic reexamination of his opinions, he thereafter industriously keeps them weeded out by the best methods he can, When, either by his own force or by the adroit suggestions of a wise governor, he has once been led to undertake such a reform, it as wise a way to begin it as any would be to ask himself, what are the sorts of objects of which I am directly aware; since, no matter

1908 Oct 29 Logic 21

how much I may subject them to criticism, it must be among these that I shall have to choose the materials out of which I shall have must construct my new opinions; and in all kinds of construction the forms must depend; in large part, upon the qualities of the available material. His catalogue of these kinds of objects might run somewhat as follows: such objects as I may see, hear, or know by tough or pressure; tastes and smells; bodily sensations, emotional feelings; recollections; imaginations; feelings of comparison and, more generally, new additional feelings arising upon the assemblage of other feelings; pleasures and impulses of attraction; pains, irritations, and impulses of repulsion; efforts and impulses to effort; resistances and impulse to resist; attentions and efforts to attend; distractions

1908 Oct 29 Logic 22

and efforts to dismiss; perceptions of resemblance, contrast, and modes of order, sense of such perceptions and of coming to perceive or understand new modes of order or new elements of resemblance and contrast; recollections or recalls of accompanying circumstances and senses of recollecting expectations and sense of expecting; senses of having forgotten; surprises, positive and negative; efforts of self-restraint; efforts to impress rules upon oneself and senses of being so impressed and of assimilations and assents; efforts to follow rules; sympathetic feelings and senses of sympathizing; senses of puzzle; etc., etc.

1908 Oct 31

If you will kindly join me in creating for your and my service the word Phaneron (plural, Phanera) to denote any object that any person is Immediately aware of, where I take object in the most

1908 Oct 31 Logic 23

general sense to denote anything that can receive a name, and meaning by Immediately" in this connexion that he does not infer or suspect it because of his being aware of something else; but just is aware of it, without any "because" at all, then the list I just gave, was of as many general types of phanera as occurred to me. But it will be important for purpose of our boy that he should in thought collect those types of Phanera into a small number of broad classes. He may draw the lines of demarcation between these in various ways; but a very long process course of experimentation with the account of which I refrain from wearying you has strongly inclinded me to think that the most way they best suited to his purpose, that of mastery over this thought; will be most perfectly aid furthered

1908 Oct 31 Logic 24

by a division pretty close to the one which I now proceed to describe. Since I do not enter upon any defence of its utility, you will very properly regard that as dubious for the present; and whether or not your own Phanera fall each into one or another of the classes I am about to describe will be left to your own powers of logical analysis to determine. What this operation of logical analysis consists in I cannot undertake to show you until you shall, with such aid as I can give you, or without such aid, have performed for yourself some considerable operation of the sort. I assume that you have naturally some strength in this direction. I must, however, warn you that the operation does not involve any fine psychological observation any fine