Monist Series on Pragmatism
5. missing
6. missing
1.288-292 G-1905-1c (c.1908)
1.573-574 G-1905-1d (1905)
1.305 G-1905-1g
1.306-311 G-1905-1h
288. There can be no psychological difficulty in
determining whether anything belongs to the phaneron or not; for whatever
* From "{pl}," c. 1908.
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seems to be before the mind ipso facto is so, in my sense of
the phrase. I invite you to consider, not everything in the
phaneron, but only its indecomposable elements, that is, those
that are logically indecomposable, or indecomposable to direct
inspection. I wish to make out a classification, or division, of
these indecomposable elements; that is, I want to sort them
into their different kinds according to their real characters. I
have some acquaintance with two different such cdassifications,
both quite true; and there may be others. Of these two I know
of, one is a division according to the form or structure of the
elements, the other according to their matter. The two most
passionately laborious years of my life were exdusively devoted
to trying to ascertain something for certain about the latter;
but I abandoned the attempt as beyond my powers, or, at any
rate, unsuited to my genius. I had not neglected to examine
what others had done but could not persuade myself that they
had been more successful than I. Fortunately, however, all
taxonomists of every department have found cdassifications
according to structure to be the most important.
289. A reader may very intelligently ask, How is it possible
for an indecomposable element to have any differences of
structure? Of internal logical structure it would be clearly
impossible. But of external structure, that is to say, structure
of its possible compounds, limited differences of structure are
possible; witness the chemical elements, of which the " groups,"
or vertical columns of Mendeleeff's table, are universally and
justly recognized as ever so much more important than the
" series," or horizontal ranks in the same table. Those columns
are characterized by their several valencies, thus:
He, Ne, A, Kr, X are medads ({...} none + the patronymic
{...}).
H, L [Li], Na, K, Cu, Rb, Ag, Cs,-,-, Au, are monads;
G [Gl], Mg, Ca, Zn, Sr, Cd, Ba, -,-, Hg, Rd [Ra], are dyads;
B, Al, Sc, Ga, Y, In, La, -, Yb, Tc [Tl], Ac are triads;
C, Si, Ti, Ge, Zr, Sn,Co[Ce],-,-,Pc[Pb], Th, are tetrads;
N, P, V, As, Cb, Sb, Pr [Nd], -, Ta, Bi, Po [Pa], are properly
pentads (as PCL5, though owing to the junction of two pegs
they often appear as triads. Their pentad character is
particularly required to explain certain phenomena of albumins);
0, S, Cr, Se, Mo, Te, Nd [Sm], -, W, -, U, are properly
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hexads (though by junction of bonds they usually appear as
dyads);
F, Cl, Mn, Br, -, I, are properly heptads (usually appearing
as monads);
Fe, Co, Ni, Ru, Rh, Pd, -, -, -, Os, Tr [Ir], Pt, are octads;
(Sm, Eu, Gd, Er, Tb, Bz [?], Cl [Ct], are not yet placed in the
table.)
290. So, then, since elements may have structure through
valency, I invite the reader to join me in a direct inspection of
the valency of elements of the phaneron. Why do I seem to see
my reader draw back? Does he fear to be compromised by my
bias, due to preconceived views? Oh, very well; yes, I do bring
some convictions to the inquiry. But let us begin by
subjecting these to criticism, postponing actual observation until all
preconceptions are disposed of, one way or the other.
291. First, then, let us ask whether or not valency is the
sole formal respect in which elements of the phaneron can
possibly vary. But seeing that the possibility of such a ground of
division is dependent upon the possibility of multivalence,
while the possibility of a division according to valency can in
nowise be regarded as a result of relations between bonds, it
follows that any division by variations of such relations must
be taken as secondary to the division according to valency, if
such division there be. Now (my logic here may be puzzling,
but it is correct), since my ten trichotomies of signs,* should
they prove to be independent of one another (which is to be
sure, highly improbable), would suffice to furnish us classes of
signs to the number of
3^10= (3^2)^5= (1O-1)^5 = 10^5 - 5.10^4
+ 10.10^3 - 10.10^2
+ 5.10 - 1
= 50000
+ 9000
+ 49
= 59049
(Voil a lesson in vulgar arithmetic thrown in to boot!), which
* See the letters to Lady Welby. These ten trichotomies are not to be confused
with the ten not completely independent classes of signs given in vol. 2, bk. II.
The latter originate from only three trichotomies; while the ten trichotomies
yield sixty-six not completely independent classes of signs.
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calculation threatens a multitude of classes too great to be
conveniently carried in one's head, rather than a group
inconveniently small, we shall, I think, do well to postpone
preparations for further divisions until there be prospect of such a
thing being wanted.
292. If, then, there be any formal division of elements of
the phaneron, there must be a division according to valency;
and we may expect medads, monads, dyads, triads, tetrads,
etc. Some of these, however, can be antecedently excluded, as
impossible; although it is important to remember that these
divisions are not exactly like the corresponding divisions of
Existential Graphs,* which have relation only to explicit
indefinites. In the present application, a medad must mean an
indecomposable idea altogether severed logically from every
other; a monad will mean an element which, except that it is
thought as applying to some subject, has no other characters
than those which are complete in it without any reference to
anything else; a dyad will be an elementary idea of something
that would possess such characters as it does possess relatively
to something else but regardlness of any third object of any
category; a triad would be an elementary idea of something
which should be such as it were relatively to two others in
different ways, but regardlless of any fourth; and so on. Some of
these, I repeat, are plainly impossible. A medad would be a
flash of mental "heat-lightning" absolutely instantaneous,
thunderless, unremembered, and altogether without effect. It
can further be said in advance, not, indeed, purely a priori but
with the degree of apriority that is proper to logic, namely, as a
necessary deduction from the fact that there are signs, that
there must be an elementary triad. For were every element of
the phaneron a monad or a dyad, without the relative of
teridentity ** (which is, of course, a triad), it is evident that no
triad could ever be built up. Now the relation of every sign to
its object and interpretant is plainly a triad. A triad might be
built up of pentads or of any higher perissad elements in many
ways. But it can be proved -- and really with extreme
simplicity, though the statement of the general proof is confusing
-- that no element can have a higher valency than three.
* See vol. 4, bk. II.
** Cf. 39&,.
573. Normative Science ** forms the mid-portion of caenoscopy
and its most characteristic part.... Logic, regarded from
one instructive, though partial and narrow, point of view, is
the theory of deliberate thinking. To say that any thinking
is deliberate is to imply that it is controlled with a view to
making it conform to a purpose or ideal. Thinking is
universally acknowledged to be an active operation. Consequently,
the control of thinking with a view to its conformity to a
standard or ideal is a special case of the control of action to make
it conform to a standard; and the theory of the former must
be a special determination of the theory of the latter. Now
special theories should always be made to rest upon the
general theories of which they are amplifications. The present
writer takes the theory of the control of conduct, and of action
in general, so as to conform to an ideal, as being the
midnormative science; that is, as the second of the trio, and as
that one of the three sciences in which the distinctive
characters of normative science are most strongly marked. He will
not undertake to pronounce any other distribution of the
matter of nonnative science to be wrong; but, according to the
dissection of that matter which seems to him to separate
studies as they must be separated in research, such will be
the mid-normative science. Since the normative sciences are
usually held to be three, Logic, Ethics, and [Esthetics], and
since he, too, makes them three, he would term the midnormative
* From the "Basis of Pragmatism." 1906. See 5.549.
** Peirce came to recognize the nature of the Normative Sciences at a very
late date (c. 1903). He wrote practically nothing on esthetics (see 2.197) and
linked most of his discussions of practics and ethics with those on pragmatism
and logic. Logic, the tbird of the Normative Sciences, being the subject on
which Peirce spent about sixty years of intensive study and on which he left the
most manuscripts, is tbe special topic of Volumes Two, Three, and Four. The
present book, accordingly, dealing as it mainly does with but two subjects
insufEiciently studied, is unusually, but necessarily, short and unsatisfactory.
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science ethics if this did not seem to be forbidden
by the received acception of that term. He accordingly
proposes to name the mid-normative science, as such (whatever
its content may be) antethics, that is, that which is put in place
of ethics, the usual second member of the trio. It is the writer's
opinion that this antethics should be the theory of the
conformity of action to an ideal. Its name, as such, will naturally be
practics. Ethics is not practics; first, because ethics involves
more than the theory of such conformity; namely, it involves
the theory of the ideal itself, the nature of the summum bonum;
and secondly, because, in so far as ethics studies the conformity
of conduct to an ideal, it is limited to a particular ideal, which,
whatever the professions of moralists may be, is in fact nothing
but a sort of composite photograph of the conscience of the
members of the community. In short, it is nothing but a
traditional standard, accepted, very wisely, without radical
criticism, but with a silly pretence of critical examination.
The science of morality, virtuous conduct, right-living, can
hardly claim a place among the heuretic sciences.
574. It has been a great, but frequent, error of writers on
ethics to confound an ideal of conduct with a motive to action.
The truth is that these two objects belong to different
categories. Every action has a motive; but an ideal only belongs
to a line [of] conduct which is deliberate. To say that conduct
is deliberate implies that each action, or each important action,
is reviewed by the actor and that his judgment is passed upon
it, as to whether he wishes his future conduct to be like that
or not. His ideal is the kind of conduct which attracts him
upon review. His self-criticism, followed by a more or less
conscious resolution that in its turn excites a determination
of his habit, will, with the aid of the sequelae, rnodify a future
action; but it will not generally be a moving cause to action.
It is an almost purely passive liking for a way of doing whatever
he may be moved to do. Although it affects his own conduct,
and nobody else's, yet the quality of feeling (for it is merely
a quality of feeling) is just the same, whether his own conduct
or that of another person, real or imaginary, is the object of
the feeling; or whether it be connected with the thought of any
action or not. If conduct is to be thoroughly deliberate, the
ideal must be a habit of feeling which has grown up under the
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influence of a course of self-criticisms and of hetero-criticisms;
and the theory of the deliberate formation of such habits of
feeling is what ought to be meant by esthetics.* It is true that
the Germans, who invented the word, and have done the most
toward developing the science, limit it to taste, that is, to the
action of the Spieltrieb from which deep and earnest emotion
would seem to be excluded. But in the writer's cpinion the
theory is the same, whether it be a question of forming a taste
in bonnets or of a preference between electrocution and
decapitation, or between supporting one's family by
agriculture or by highway robbery. The difference of earnestness is
of vast practical moment; but it has nothing to do with heuretic
science.
According to this view, esthetics, practics, and logic form
one distinctly marked whole, one separate department of
heuretic science; and the question where precisely the lines of
separation between them are to be drawn is quite secondary.
It is clear, however, that esthetics relates to feeling, practics
to action, logic to thought.
* Cf. 5.130, 5.553.
305. Suppose I begin by inquiring of you, Reader, in what
particulars a feeling of redness or of purple without beginning,
end, or change; or an eternally sounding and unvarying
railway whistle; or a sempiterne thrill of joyous delight -- or
rather, such as would afford us delight, but supposed to be in
that respect quite neutral -- that should constitute the entire
universe, would differ from a substance? I suppose you will
tell me that no such thing could be alone in the universe
because, firstly, it would require a mind to feel it, which would
not be the feeling itself; secondly, the color or sound and
probably also the thrill of delight would consist of vibrations;
thirdly, none of them could last forever without a fiow of time;
fourthly, each would have a quality, which would be a
determination in several respects, the color in hue, luminosity,
chroma, and vividness; the sound in pitch, timbre (itself highly
complex), loudness, and vividness; the delight more or less
sensual, more or less emotional, more or less elevated, etc.; and
fifthly, each would require a physical substratum altogether
disparate to the feeling itself. But I point out to you that these
things are only known to us by extraneous experience; none of
them are either seen in the color, heard in the sound, or felt in
the visceral sensation. Consequently, there can be no logical
difficulty in supposing them to be absent, and for my part, I
encounter not the slightest psychological difficulty in doing so,
either. To suppose, for example, that there is a flow of time, or
any degree of vividness, be it high or low, seems to me quite as
uncalled for as to suppose that there is freedom of the press or
a magnetic field.
* From "An Apology for Pragmaticism," intended for the January, 1907
Monist. See 4.540.
306. By a feeling, I mean an instance of that kind of
consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any
process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act
by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from
another, which has its own positive quality which consists in
nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is, however it may
have been brought about; so that if this feeling is present
during a lapse of time, it is wholly and equally present at every
moment of that time. To reduce this description to a simple
definition, I will say that by a feeling I mean an instance of
that sort of element of consciousness which is all that it is
positively, in itself, regardless of anything else.
307. A feeling, then, is not an event, a happening, a
coming to pass, since a coming to pass cannot be such unless there
was a time when it had not come to pass; and so it is not in
itself all that it is, but is relative to a previous state. A feeling
is a state, which is in its entirety in every moment of time as
long as it endures. But a feeling is not a single state which is
other than an exact reproduction of itself. For if that
reproduction is in the same mind, it must be at a different time, and
then the being of the feeling would be relative to the particular
time in which it occurred, which would be something different
from the feeling itself, violating the definition which makes the
feeling to be all that it is regardless of anything else. Or, if the
reproduction were simultaneous with the feeling, it must be in
another mind, and thus the identity of the feeling would depend
upon the mind in which it was, which is other than the feeling;
and again the definition would be violated in the same way.
Thus, any feeling must be identical with any exact duplicate
of it, which is as much as to say that the feeling is simply a
quality of immediate consciousness.
308. But it must be admitted that a feeling experienced in
an outward sensation may be reproduced in memory. For to
deny this would be idle nonsense. For instance, you
experience, let us say, a certain color sensation due to red-lead. It
has a definite hue, luminosity, and chroma. These [are] three
elements -- which are not separate in the feeling, it is true, and
* From "Phaneroscopy {...} intended for the January, 1907, Monist. See
4.540.
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are not, therefore, in the feeling at all, but are said to be in it,
as a way of expressing the results which would follow,
according to the principles of chromatics, from certain-experiments
with a color disk, color-box, or other similar apparatus. In
that sense, the color sensation which you derive from looking at
the red-lead has a certain hue, luminosity, and chroma which
completely define the quality of the color. The vividness,
however, is independent of all three of these elements; and it is
very different in the memory of the color a quarter of a second
after the actual sensation from what it is in the sensation itself,
although this memory is conceivably perfectly true as to hue,
luminosity, and chroma, which truth constitutes it an exact
reproduction of the entire quality of the feeling.
309. It follows that since the vividness of a feeling -- which
would be more accurately described as the vividness of a
consciousness of the feeling -- is independent of every component
of the quality of that consciousness, and consequently is
independent of the resultant of those components, which resultant
quality is the feeling itself. We thus learn what vividness is
not; and it only remains to ascertain what else it is.
310. To this end two remarks will be useful. The first is
that of whatever is in the mind in any mode of consciousness
there is necessarily an immediate consciousness and
consequently a feeling. The proof of this proposition is very
instructive as to the nature of feeling; for it shows that, if by
psychology we mean the positive, or observational, science of the
mind or of consciousness, then although the entire
consciousness at any one instant is nothing but a feeling, yet psychology
can teach us nothing of the nature of feeling, nor can we gain
knowledge of any feeling by introspection, the feeling being
completely veiled from introspection, for the very reason that
it is our immediate consciousness. Possibly this curious truth
was what Emerson was trying to grasp -- but if so, pretty
unsuccessfully -- when he wrote the lines,
The old Sphinx bit her thick lip --
Said, "Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,
Of thine eye I am eyebeam.
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"Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Always it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie."
But whatever he may have meant, it is plain enough that all
that is immediately present to a man is what is in his mind in
the present instant. His whole life is in the present. But when
he asks what is the content of the present instant, his question
always comes too late. The present has gone by, and what
remains of it is greatly metamorphosed. He can, it is true,
recogmze that he was at that time, for example, looking at a
specimen of red-lead, and must have seen that color, which, he
perceives, is something positive and sui generis, of the nature
of feeling. But nobody's immediate consciousness, unless when
he was much more than half asleep, ever consisted wholly of a
color-sensation; and since a feeling is absolutely simple and
without parts -- as it evidently is, since it is whatever it is
regardlness of anything else, and therefore regardless of any
part, which would be something other than the whole -- it
follows that if the red color-sensation was not the whole feeling
of the instant it has nothing in common with the feeling of the
instant. Indeed, although a feeling is immediate
consciousness, that is, is whatever of consciousness there may be that is
immediately present, yet there is no consciousness in it because
it is instantaneous. For we have seen already that feeling is
nothing but a quality, and a quality is not conscious: it is a
mere possibility. We can, it is true, see what a feeling in
general is like; that, for example, this or that red is a feeling; and
it is perfectly conceivable that a being should have that color
for its entire consciousness, throughout a lapse of time, and
therefore at every instant of that time. But such a being could
never know anything about its own consciousness. It could
not think anything that is expressible as a proposition. It
could have no idea of such a thing. It would be confined to
feeling that color. Thus, if you perceive that you must at the
instant in question have been looking at a given specimen of
red-lead, you know that that color has some resemblance to
your feeling at that instant. But this only means that when
the feeling gives place to comparison this resemblance appears.
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But there is no resemblance at all in feeling, since feeling is
whatever it is, positively and regardless of anything else, while
the resemblance of anything lies in the comparison of that
thing with something else....
311. Every operation of the mind, however complex, has
its absolutely simple feeling, the emotion of the tout ensemble.
This is a secondary feeling or sensation excited from within the
mind, just as the qualities of outward sense are excited by
something psychic without us. It seems at first glance
unaccountable that a mere slight difference in the speed of vibration
should make such a difference of quality as that between deep
vermillion and violet blue. But then it is to be remembered
that it is doubtless our imperfect knowledge of those vibrations
which has led us to represent them abstractly as differing only
in quantity. There is already a hint in the behavior of
electrons that a lower speed and a greater one 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.