14

φαν11 bis [See 11 ter]

the body be of that mysterious nature that we call “matter.” The soul without
the body is simply an impossibility and an absurdity. The soul in the body certainly
has characters utterly incongruous to those of a body without a soul, however. A sign must have an
interpretation, or signification. This interpretant, this signification is simply a metempsychosis into another body; a
translation into another language. This new version of the thought receives, in turn, an interpretation, and its interpretant gets itself interpreted, and so on, until an interpretant appears which is no longer of the nature of a sign; and this I am
to show to you by good evidence is, for one class of signs, a Quality, and for another, a Deed;
but for intellectual concepts, is a conditional determination of the soul as to
how it would conduct itself under conceivable circumstances. (I here merely give a roughly simplified statement that must receive fine corrections further on, in a part of my argument
which I am relegating to another article.) That ultimate, definitive, and final (i.e. eventually to be reached,) interpretant (final I mean, in the logical sense of attaining the purpose, is also final in the sense of bringing the series of translations to [?????] for the obvious reason that it is not itself a sign) is to be regarded as the ultimate signification of the sign. But [??????] this perfect fruit of thought can hardly itself be called thought, since it has no signification and does not belong to the faculty of cognition at all; but rather to the character.