MS 298-299 Phaneroscopy

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have differences which we have not been aware of. People wonder, too, how dead matter can excite feelings in the mind. For my part, instead of wondering how it can be, I feel much disposed to deny downright that it is possible. These new discoveries have reminded us how very little we know of the constitution of matter; and I prefer to guess that it is a psychic feeling of red without us which arouses a sympathetic feeling of red in our senses.]

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ought to reveal, then, whatever common nature, the signification of all thoughts must necessarily possess. You “catch on,” I presume; — you apprehend in what way the system of Existential Graphs is to throw a light upon the truth of Pragmaticism. Namely, it will show whether the common nature which [????] belongs to all significations of concepts be or be not that ilk which Pragmaticism consists in supposing it to be.

I do not [pretend?] that the system is indispensible to this purpose; since I myself had become well acquainted, in outline, at least, with the substance of its teachings. I only mean that it immensely facilitates the learning of a difficult lesson by rendering literally visible and putting before one's very eyes the operation of thinking in action[?]. That it really does so becomes plain as soon as we stop to reflect a little upon the fact that thinking always takes the form of dialogue, a dialogue between different phases of the ego, and that, being a dialogue, it is essentially an affair composed of signs, as its matter, just as a game of chess has the chessmen as its matter. Not that the particular signs employed are themselves the thinking! Oh, no; no whit more than the

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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. Do I hear a mutter, "If he intends that thought is the meaning of the signs, I wonder what he means by his odd phrase, 'the meaning of a concept!" Well, wonder on, till truth make all things plain, when you shall have come to discern what "meaning" means.

An unpenetrating study of the rules of Graphs would not much more aid a person to comprehend the common nature of the significance of Greek or Gaelic grammar; which would itself be of not very

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much more service than a study of the psychology of thinking would be. The which would be not a bit better than examining the brain under a microscope, could we only see how the whips of the brain-cells are thrashed about, and could we recognize the significance of each lash. Yet how many writers of out generation (I will name Husserl, if I must instance one among the hordes) after underscored promises that their discoveries shall be of logic, and not of psychology, forthwith become intent upon these elements of the process of thinking which are special to the human mind, as we find it, to the utter neglect of those elements which equally belong to every mode of embodying the though. The few logicians who are frankly psychologies, [?] Jerusalem, really do not carry this fault so far as many who emphasize the distinction between the two sciences. It is a main advantage of Existential Graphs, as a guide to Pragmaticism, that it holds up thought to our contemplation wrong side out, where all that appears is so bare and so plain that we are neither seduced into

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the bye-path of the distinctly English logicians, say Jacobs among another host, puerilities about forms of speech, nor to the far worse, because more engaging, disvarications of those who conceive of logic as the "Natural History" of thought.

But perhaps you may be inclined to dispute my claim that Existential Graphs present a moving picture of thought; and if your point be that modality, though it is represented, after a fashion, in the Graphs, is not diagrammatized, is nt presented in such a form as really to elucidate its structure and functions, I shall have to confess that I am not, myself, satisfied with this feature of the system. I can only plead that is is not ruinous to my purpose.

If the objection be that the System of Existential Graphs only exhibits the action of reasoning, but neither judgment nor conception, I