8

φαν7

signs employed are themselves the thought! Oh, no; no
whit more than the skins of an onion are the onion. (About as much so,
however.) One selfsame thought may be carried upon the vehicle of
English, German, Greek, or Gaelic; in diagrams, or in equations, or in
Graphs: all these are but so many skins of the onion, its inessential
accidents. Yet that the thought should have some possible expression
for some possible interpreter, is the very being of its being. Do I hear a mutter, something like this?
“If he intends that thought is the meaning of the signs, I wonder
what he can mean by his strange phrase, ‘the meaning of a concept’!”
“Well, wonder on,” says the bully Bottom, “till Truth make all things plain;”
that is, until the green-curtain of intellectual experience
shall have rolled up and fully disclosed to you what the word “meaning”
means.